Graduate Platform Engineer

Learning & Growth

Approaches every infrastructure task as an opportunity to learn how systems work, not just to complete the task.

Asks questions without hesitation - particularly "what would happen if this went wrong?" and "how would we know?"

Applies feedback consistently and tracks personal development over time.

Reads documentation, explores cloud console UIs, and experiments in sandbox environments to build intuition.

Reflects regularly on their own progress, identifying gaps and discussing them with their TTL or mentor.

Shows willingness to learn from mistakes without defensiveness - infrastructure mistakes are learning opportunities when caught in non-production.

Seeks out pairing and shadowing opportunities proactively, particularly around incident response and deployments.

Delivery

Completes assigned infrastructure tasks reliably within agreed timeframes with close guidance.

Raises blockers early rather than pushing through silently - particularly important in infrastructure work where wrong assumptions can have broad impact.

Takes quality seriously from the start, even on small configuration changes.

Follows the agreed development workflow - branching, committing, opening PRs, getting review before applying changes.

Responds to review feedback promptly and addresses it thoroughly before requesting re-review.

Keeps task status up to date in the team's tracking tools.

Makes incremental, reviewable commits with clear messages describing what infrastructure changed and why.

Quality & Craft

Writes IaC and pipeline configuration that is readable and follows the team's style conventions with support.

Develops an instinct for safety - understanding that infrastructure changes can have wide blast radius and checking carefully before applying.

Reads and understands the test coverage and validation patterns for infrastructure changes they are making.

Follows the team's change management and review process - not applying configuration changes without going through review, even for "small" changes.

Avoids submitting configuration with known issues or unexplained hardcoded values without prior discussion.

Updates runbooks and documentation as part of their definition of done.

Communication

Provides clear, concise updates in stand-ups - what they worked on, what they plan to do, what is blocking them.

Writes PR descriptions that explain what infrastructure is changing, why, and how to verify the change is correct.

Asks questions in writing when appropriate so that answers can benefit the wider team.

Communicates learning needs honestly with their TTL and mentor.

Responds to messages and review comments promptly during working hours.

Summarises their understanding when given verbal instructions to confirm correct interpretation - especially important in infrastructure contexts where misunderstandings can cause outages.

Collaboration

Contributes positively to team energy and culture.

Communicates openly and asks for help when needed.

Respects the expertise of more experienced colleagues while building their own voice.

Participates actively in stand-ups, retrospectives, planning sessions, and team discussions.

Pairs with senior engineers willingly and engages during sessions rather than passively observing.

Builds awareness of what software engineering teams need from the platform - treating them as customers, not just requesters.

Respects agreed team norms around working hours, communication channels, and on-call responsibilities.

Ownership

Takes responsibility for completing tasks they have committed to, rather than waiting to be chased.

Follows through on review actions and does not consider a change done until it has met all agreed criteria and been verified.

Flags uncertainty about infrastructure requirements or approach rather than making assumptions - particularly important given the blast radius of infrastructure errors.

Keeps their own task board updated so the team always has an accurate picture of progress.

Owns their learning plan and does not wait for opportunities to be handed to them.

Acknowledges mistakes openly, explains what happened, and focuses on what they will do differently next time.

Technical Foundation

Develops working knowledge of cloud fundamentals and applies it in delivered infrastructure tasks under guidance.

Uses Git competently for branching, committing, and raising pull requests as part of everyday work.

Reads and navigates existing Terraform, Helm charts, and CI/CD configuration to understand context before making changes.

Begins to understand the team's deployment, release, and rollback process at a conceptual level.

Builds familiarity with Kubernetes at a practical level - applying and understanding manifests, reading pod logs, using kubectl for basic operations.

Understands the basic architecture of the systems they are supporting well enough to make safe, localised configuration changes.

Develops awareness of cloud security fundamentals - IAM, network security groups, secret management - and why they matter.

[ Name ] Graduate Platform Engineer – Growth Tracker

GPE · SFIA 1-2 · raganmcgill.co.uk

Strengths to recognise

Development focus areas

Overall assessment & agreed actions