Hiring a Platform Engineer?
Your team is hiring; I run the technical round for you. One 60-minute live interview per candidate, with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours.
About the role — Builds the thing other engineers build on. Product sense is half the job.
What you get
A 60-minute live interview with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours. No retainer; fee quoted on the scoping call.
01 — Why this role is hard to assess
The hardest part of platform work is knowing what not to build, and whether anyone actually adopted what you shipped. Candidates default to describing infrastructure; the signal is in how they treat internal users as users.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- A platform capability they shipped that nobody adopted, and why
- How they decide between a golden path and an escape hatch
- Measuring developer experience with something other than a survey
- Versioning and deprecating an internal API other teams depend on
03 — A scenario from the round
Three teams have each built their own deploy tooling because the platform did not fit them. You have one quarter. What do you do, and how do you know it worked?
Scenarios rotate between candidates so the round stays fair, and none of the published examples are used verbatim.
What I listen for
Failure modes specific to this role
- Mandates adoption rather than earning it
- Cannot name a platform feature they removed
- Measures success by components shipped
- Has no view on where the abstraction should stop
Scored on
- Platform-as-product thinking
- Abstraction judgement
- Adoption evidence
- API stewardship
- Influence without authority
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a Platform Engineer this quarter?
Fifteen minutes to agree the rubric, then I run the round. One candidate or twenty — there is no retainer and no minimum.