Junior Platform Engineer | Role Archetype

Building CI/CD pipelines and foundational IaC, growing practical Kubernetes and observability skills, and contributing meaningfully to the internal developer platform with growing independence.

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Growing into this role

Graduate Platform Engineer to Junior Platform Engineer

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Next step pathway

Junior Platform Engineer to Intermediate Platform Engineer

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Performance Calibration

Junior Platform Engineer - Performance Levels

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Behaviour Tracker

Junior Platform Engineer - Performance Tracker

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Overview

As a Junior Platform Engineer, you are moving beyond pure learning mode and starting to deliver meaningful contributions to the team's platform. You build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, write Terraform, and support the internal developer platform - increasingly with less moment-to-moment guidance, though still with clear direction and close support.

You are expected to complete well-defined tasks independently, raise blockers early, and bring increasing rigour to the safety and reliability of your infrastructure work. You are beginning to develop instincts about blast radius, change risk, and the developer experience the platform exists to deliver.

Key Responsibilities

CI/CD Pipeline Development

Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines under the direction of an intermediate or senior platform engineer.
Write pipeline configuration that is clean, documented, and follows the team's standards.
Investigate and resolve pipeline failures - understanding root causes rather than just restarting jobs.
Contribute to improvements in pipeline speed, reliability, and developer experience.
Participate in the design of small pipeline improvements, contributing ideas and flagging concerns.

Infrastructure as Code

Write Terraform or equivalent IaC to provision and modify cloud resources under guidance.
Follow the team's IaC standards - module structure, variable conventions, state management, and documentation.
Raise pull requests for all infrastructure changes and respond to review feedback thoroughly.
Develop understanding of how IaC state works and how to manage it safely - plan before apply, review diffs carefully.

Monitoring and Observability

Contribute to monitoring and alerting configuration for platform components.
Investigate alerts and anomalies, escalating to a senior engineer when root cause is unclear.
Develop familiarity with the team's observability stack - metrics, logs, traces - and use it to diagnose platform issues.
Update runbooks with new failure modes and resolution steps discovered during incident investigation.

Collaboration and Learning

Engage constructively in team ceremonies and contribute ideas in planning and retrospectives.
Build relationships with software engineering teams - understanding their workflow and what good developer experience looks like.
Continue developing technical skills through reading, internal learning, and on-the-job exposure.
Provide helpful, specific feedback in code reviews on other junior or graduate engineers' work.

Role Specific

CI/CD Pipeline Delivery

Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable software teams to ship safely and quickly - applying the team's tooling, conventions, and reliability standards consistently.

Infrastructure as Code Practice

Develop working proficiency in Terraform or equivalent IaC tooling, applying it to provision and manage cloud resources with the safety and review discipline the team expects.

Developer Experience Contribution

Actively understand what software engineering teams experience when using the platform - surfacing friction, fixing small irritants, and contributing to a platform that engineers actively want to use.

Behaviours

Learning & Growth

Actively seeks to deepen understanding of cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes operations, and CI/CD patterns.
Reflects on feedback from code reviews and applies lessons to subsequent work without being reminded.
Reads platform engineering literature, follows community discussions (e.g. CNCF), and brings relevant ideas back to the team.
Develops awareness of their own knowledge gaps and proactively raises them with their TTL or mentor.
Takes on moderately stretching tasks and uses them as development opportunities rather than defaulting to familiar approaches.
Builds understanding of the software engineering teams they serve - what they are building, what their delivery pressures are, what they need from the platform.

Delivery

Delivers well-defined platform tasks independently within agreed timeframes.
Manages their own task queue effectively - breaking down work, estimating effort, and flagging when estimates change.
Raises blockers promptly with enough context for a senior to help efficiently.
Keeps PRs reviewable - appropriately scoped, with clear descriptions, terraform plan output where relevant, and evidence of testing.
Responds to review feedback promptly and addresses it thoroughly before requesting re-review.
Tracks task status accurately so the team always has a clear picture of progress.
Maintains change safety discipline - planning before applying, reviewing diffs carefully, and never bypassing the review process.

Quality & Craft

Writes IaC and pipeline configuration that is clean, readable, and follows team conventions without needing to be reminded.
Applies appropriate security and operational standards to all infrastructure work - encryption, least-privilege IAM, appropriate tagging.
Reviews own work critically before submitting - checking for missing dependencies, security concerns, and unintended side effects.
Writes clear documentation and runbook entries for platform components they build or modify.
Identifies and flags technical debt encountered during delivery work, even when not expected to resolve it immediately.
Develops growing instinct for blast radius - understanding the scope of impact of any given infrastructure change.

Communication

Provides clear, specific stand-up updates that give teammates a genuine picture of progress and blockers.
Writes PR descriptions that explain what infrastructure is changing, why, and how reviewers can verify correctness.
Communicates platform concerns clearly to senior engineers - with evidence from logs, metrics, or plan output.
Asks focused, well-formed questions that show prior investigation rather than asking before attempting.
Documents decisions and assumptions in IaC and runbooks so future engineers understand the reasoning.
Gives constructive, specific feedback in code reviews on peers' work.

Collaboration

Builds effective working relationships with software engineering teams - understanding their workflow and acting on developer experience feedback.
Contributes constructively to team ceremonies - retrospectives, planning, and technical discussions.
Offers meaningful code review feedback to graduate engineers, balancing rigour with encouragement.
Shares knowledge with teammates - useful debugging patterns, operational tips, lessons from incidents - without being asked.
Works openly rather than siloing work in progress - makes it easy for others to see and assist.
Engages with incident response constructively - contributing to investigation and learning from post-incident reviews.

Ownership

Takes full responsibility for completing tasks they have committed to, including follow-through on review actions.
Flags uncertainty about infrastructure requirements or constraints early rather than making assumptions.
Monitors platform components they have built or modified after deployment - not just during development.
Proactively investigates alerts in their area of responsibility rather than waiting to be assigned.
Owns their own learning progression and actively manages it, seeking feedback and opportunities.
Acknowledges mistakes clearly, investigates root causes, and shares learnings with the team.

Technical Foundation

Demonstrates working Terraform and CI/CD proficiency in all delivered work.
Applies security best practices consistently to infrastructure work - IAM, encryption, network controls.
Operates Kubernetes confidently at a day-to-day level - deploying workloads, diagnosing failures, managing resources.
Uses the team's observability stack effectively - writing alert rules, reading dashboards, and using logs and metrics to diagnose issues.
Understands cloud networking well enough to reason about connectivity, security group rules, and routing.
Maintains working knowledge of the team's deployment and release patterns, including rollback procedures.
Understands the developer experience the platform provides and actively uses that understanding to prioritise improvements.

Skills

Working proficiency in a CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Tekton, or equivalent) - writing pipelines, debugging failures, and improving reliability.

Foundational Terraform skills - resource creation, variables, outputs, modules, state basics.

Practical Kubernetes knowledge - deploying workloads, reading logs, describing resources, understanding namespaces and RBAC basics.

Basic understanding of cloud networking - VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancers.

Growing familiarity with monitoring and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent).

Understanding of container image building, registries, and image security scanning basics.

Version control proficiency - branching, pull requests, resolving conflicts.

AI AI & Automation Expectations Updated for the AI-augmented era

AI Augmented Delivery

Uses AI coding assistants to accelerate IaC and pipeline development - generating Terraform resource blocks, CI/CD workflow stubs, and Kubernetes manifests - while validating outputs against the team's standards and security requirements.
Reviews AI-generated Terraform critically - checking for missing resource dependencies, overly permissive IAM, missing encryption, and incorrect variable references before raising a PR.
Uses AI to help write runbooks and operational documentation - generating initial drafts from incident descriptions, then refining for accuracy and completeness.
Recognises that AI is particularly prone to generating cloud configuration that looks correct but contains subtle security issues - applies deliberate security review to AI-generated IaC.
Uses AI to understand Kubernetes error messages, interpret Terraform plan output, and explain cloud networking concepts - as a learning accelerant alongside official documentation.
Develops discipline around providing context to AI - including cloud provider, existing resource constraints, team naming conventions - to improve output relevance and reduce hallucination.