Senior Platform Engineer – Growth Tracker

[ Name ] Senior Platform Engineer – Growth Tracker

SPE  ·  SFIA 4-5  ·  raganmcgill.co.uk

1Novice
No evidence of this yet · Lacks experience in this competency · Requires significant training and guidance
2Developing
Evidence of trying but lacking consistency · Demonstrates effort and initial attempts · Progressing, consistency is needed
3Proficient
Evidence of doing this with areas for improvement · Competent with some areas for enhancement · Meets most expectations
4Accomplished
Evidence of consistently meeting expectations · Highly reliable in delivering results · Maintains performance standards
5Expert
Evidence of exceeding expectations · Demonstrates exceptional mastery · Autonomous · Leads and mentors others
Learning & Growth
Delivery
Quality & Craft
Communication
Collaboration
Ownership
Technical Foundation
Learning & Growth
Actively monitors the platform engineering landscape - CNCF project evolution, cloud provider capability announcements, emerging IDP patterns - and evaluates relevance to the organisation.
Invests in depth across the platform stack - not just Kubernetes and IaC but networking, security, cost engineering, and developer experience.
Seeks out peer review and challenge from other senior practitioners - from internal peer networks and the broader platform engineering community.
Identifies areas where the team's collective capability needs to grow and creates structured opportunities to develop it.
Brings external perspectives into the team - from KubeCon, PlatformCon, SREcon, and peer network conversations.
Reflects critically on past architectural decisions - capturing what was learned and ensuring those lessons shape future choices.
Delivery
Leads the delivery of large, complex platform work - coordinating across engineers, managing dependencies, and ensuring coherent technical execution.
Maintains personal delivery velocity on significant technical work alongside leadership and mentoring responsibilities.
Drives delivery rhythm on platform improvement programmes - breaking ambiguous work into deliverable increments and maintaining momentum.
Identifies and removes delivery blockers for the broader team - dependency management, decision facilitation, technical unblocking.
Manages the tension between long-term platform investment and short-term engineering team needs - making reasoned trade-offs transparently.
Ensures large deliveries land fully - monitoring, runbooks, documentation, and team readiness - not just infrastructure applied.
Quality & Craft
Sets the quality standard for the discipline - their own work is a reference implementation of what good platform engineering looks like.
Designs infrastructure that is secure, observable, cost-efficient, and maintainable - treating all four as non-negotiable, not traded off against each other.
Identifies systemic platform quality issues - security debt, reliability gaps, developer experience failures - and drives structured remediation.
Reviews architectural proposals critically - identifying failure modes, scalability limits, security gaps, and operational risks before they are built in.
Champions platform testing - validating IaC with automated tests, infrastructure integration tests, and regular GameDays.
Establishes engineering standards that others apply consistently - Terraform module patterns, Kubernetes deployment standards, observability requirements.
Communication
Communicates platform strategy and architectural decisions with clarity - presenting options, trade-offs, and recommendations to both technical and engineering leadership audiences.
Writes architecture decision records and platform standards that stand as durable, implementable references.
Influences without authority - building persuasive cases for technical direction through evidence, credibility, and demonstrated outcomes.
Facilitates technical discussions productively - drawing out perspectives, resolving disagreement, and reaching clear decisions.
Communicates reliability risk clearly to senior leadership - translating technical concerns into service availability and business impact language.
Represents platform engineering in cross-functional forums with confidence and depth.
Collaboration
Builds strong, trust-based relationships with software engineering leaders - understanding their delivery needs, priorities, and platform pain points.
Works with the Platform Architect to align team delivery with long-term technical strategy.
Partners with security engineers to ensure the platform meets the organisation's security and compliance requirements.
Drives collaboration across engineering teams - establishing shared platform standards, shared tooling, and mutual accountability for reliability.
Creates a collaborative culture within the platform team - psychological safety, knowledge sharing, and open technical debate.
Represents platform engineering interests in product and delivery planning, ensuring platform work is appropriately sequenced and resourced.
Ownership
Takes accountability for the health and direction of the platform - not just their own work but the coherence, reliability, and developer experience of the whole.
Leads incident response for significant platform failures - investigating, communicating, resolving, and preventing recurrence with authority and calm.
Owns the platform's reliability posture collectively - not just responding to incidents but proactively improving the platform's resilience between them.
Makes bold technical recommendations when the evidence supports them - not defaulting to safe, familiar choices when better options exist.
Takes responsibility for the technical environment junior and intermediate engineers work in - setting them up for success through standards, tooling, and support.
Holds themselves and others accountable for developer experience outcomes - not just platform uptime but the speed, confidence, and autonomy of the engineers the platform serves.
Technical Foundation
Demonstrates mastery-level Kubernetes and Terraform capability applied in the design of high-quality, production-grade platform components.
Designs and operates cloud architectures at scale - understanding the failure modes, security implications, and cost profiles of significant architectural choices.
Operates at the intersection of platform engineering and reliability engineering - designing systems that are observable, resilient, and maintainable at organisational scale.
Deep understanding of cloud security - zero-trust networking, workload identity, supply chain security, and compliance architecture.
Maintains awareness of the FinOps discipline - cloud cost attribution, optimisation strategies, and commitment-based pricing models.
Understands developer experience at depth - DORA metrics, deployment frequency, change failure rate - and designs platform capabilities to drive improvement in these outcomes.
Contributes to the platform engineering discipline beyond the team - writing, speaking, or open source contribution that builds the organisation's external reputation.
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples
Evidence & examples

Strengths to recognise

Development focus areas

Overall assessment & agreed actions

raganmcgill.co.uk  ·  Senior Platform Engineer Growth Tracker