Platform engineering - BairesDev: Maturity is redefining talent
This is a guest post written by Justice Erolin in his role, Chief Technology Officer, BairesDev, a nearshore software development and staff augmentation company.
Erolin writes in full as follows…
Platform engineering is the discipline of building self-service abstractions and paved paths that let developers ship faster, more securely and with less cognitive load.
It’s more than just ‘own infra’ as it works to productise services for internal users.
As software development partners, we’ve seen a clear shift.
Platform engineering is becoming a core part of how teams build and ship software. Gartner projects that 80 percent of large engineering orgs will run a platform team by 2026 and Google Cloud adds that 94 percent of enterprises call AI “critical or important” to the future of those platforms.
What used to be a side project is now the backbone of software delivery and AI is speeding that transformation. So, the big question is, what kind of talent actually makes it work?
Digital documentation
Today’s platform teams are changing how developers interact with tools. You’re starting to see gen-AI show up in simple, useful ways. Documentation writes itself as code is pushed. Templates spin up services and policy modules come pre-filled. These small moves reduce friction and help developers stay in flow.
That shift raises the bar for platform engineers. The expectation now is to design for flow, anticipate where developers slow down and preempt it with well-placed automation, smart defaults, or AI copilots that stay out of the way until they’re useful.
DevOps gave teams freedom, but at scale, it led to duplicate pipelines, multiple Terraform flavours and unclear “blessed” images.
Self-service satisfaction
Platform engineering steps in and says, let’s product-ize the paved road. That means reusable modules, secure golden paths and self-service environments. Culturally, it’s a product mindset. Platform engineers gather feedback, track internal NPS and ship small improvements.
The two aren’t rivals; they’re a relay team.
Red Hat’s 2024 survey found 62 percent of enterprises already run a dedicated platform team alongside their DevOps practice. In other words, DevOps remains the “you build it, you run it” philosophy. Platform engineering just makes the running part a lot easier.
Most platform engineers were senior DevOps or site reliability engineering (SRE) folks yesterday. The foundations are still the same, but the expectations have expanded. Now it’s also about:
- Thinking like a product person
- Writing infrastructure as code and managing policy through code
- Automating security and compliance
- Being fluent enough in AI tools to integrate them safely and usefully
Software engineers looking to make the switch can start with internal tooling. They should try to write a CLI wrapper, automate a test matrix, document the workflow, then socialise it. That habit of solving once and sharing is the essence of the job.
BairesDev‘s Erolin: Platform engineering steps in and says, let’s product-ise the paved road.
While upskilling programs are more than desirable, a hands-on approach will help in lieu of formal training. Start by contributing small pull requests to the internal platform. Shadow an SRE during an incident. Experiment with an approved AI assistant. Pair with a platform product manager and see how dev pain turns into a backlog item. These kinds of hands-on steps build the instincts that matter.
As platform engineering becomes core strategy, new roles emerge. Expect to see titles like “Internal Platform PM” or “AI Enablement Lead” to pop up on requisition lists. The skill sets are evolving. Platform teams need builders who think like product managers and collaborate like engineers.
If your developers still file a ticket to get a sandbox, it’s not a DevOps problem.
It’s a platform opportunity.
Infrastructure & guardrails
The best teams cut ticket ops by 80–90% with self-service infrastructure and guardrails.
Getting there takes engineers who can simplify, listen and build for real-world use. With the right talent in place, platform engineering moves from overhead to advantage.
BairesDev supports platform engineering with nearshore teams that integrate into client environments and bring the specialized skills required to build, scale and evolve internal platforms. Justice Erolin is chief technology officer at BairesDev, a bootstrapped software outsourcing company. He leads global engineering teams and translates company goals into technical strategies, drawing on his background in engineering and technology leadership. Justice joined BairesDev in 2020 after holding several senior roles in the tech industry.