Platform engineers who treat internal tooling as product.
We place platform, DevEx, and SRE engineers at companies that take their internal developer experience seriously — not as a side-quest for the backend team.
The platform engineer market — the honest version.
Platform engineering is one of the fastest-growing senior specializations, and one of the easiest to mis-hire for. The difference between an ops engineer writing shell scripts and a platform engineer shipping a paved-road product for 80+ internal developers is enormous. We screen for platform-as-product thinking: documentation discipline, adoption metrics, internal user research, deprecation strategy, and the willingness to say no to bespoke team requests.
What we actually screen for.
Every platform engineer candidate goes through a structured technical screen conducted by an ex-engineer recruiter before you see their profile.
- Kubernetes depth — operator authorship, CRDs, admission controllers, real multi-cluster experience
- Infrastructure-as-code — Terraform, Pulumi, CDK, and how they handle drift at scale
- CI/CD sophistication — GitHub Actions, Buildkite, internal builds, caching strategy
- Observability ownership — tracing stack, logging strategy, cost-conscious metrics
- Security posture — secrets management, SBOM, image provenance, supply chain
- Internal product thinking — do they collect feedback, publish RFCs, and measure adoption
How we run a platform engineer search.
Days 0–2
Intake + written brief
Scope the platform: what paved roads exist today, what's missing, team size, on-call arrangement.
Days 2–12
Sourcing + screen
Structured screen including a real debugging scenario and a platform-product question.
Days 10–14
First shortlist
4–6 candidates with written assessments.
Days 14–28
Interviews + offer
Coordinated loop including deep-dive technical round and cross-team partner interviews.
Real salary bands across our three markets.
- Pakistan (remote international)
USD $40K–$100K
- Canada
CAD $140K–$220K
- United States
USD $170K–$280K
Titles we place under this role type.
- Senior Platform Engineer
- Staff Platform Engineer
- Developer Experience Engineer
- Senior SRE
- Infrastructure Engineer
- Kubernetes Platform Engineer
- Build & Tooling Engineer
Platform Engineer hiring — questions we hear.
Platform engineers ship internal products consumed by other engineers (paved roads, deployment systems, internal APIs). SREs own production reliability (incident response, SLOs, runbooks, capacity). Many candidates blend the two; we ask you to tell us which orientation you need, then calibrate. If the answer is 'both', we find candidates with a clear primary strength and make sure they acknowledge the secondary.
Yes — we have direct reach into engineers from companies running platforms for 500+ internal developers. The tradeoff is those candidates expect the role to have real platform surface area, not 'also do the platform on the side.' We'll tell you directly if your role is under-scoped for the people you say you want.
Ready to run this search?
Submit a brief and a senior recruiter will reply within 24 business hours with a proposed timeline, calibrated fee structure, and sample profiles.
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