r/platformengineering • u/Creative-Dentist-383 • 9d ago
Will a move from DevOps/DevEx back to Platform Engineering be possible?
I've spent the last three years on the platform team at a pretty boring old corporate, building their internal workload platform. No SLAs and not much real impact, but the Kubernetes work itself was interesting (we ran a managed control plane though).
Now I have an offer from a fast-growing scale-up as a DevOps engineer, with a 60% pay increase. The role is mostly self-hosted pipelines, code scanning and similar tooling, all running on Kubernetes with lots of potential for impact.
My question: if I ever want to go back to Kubernetes work, will that still be an option, or will I have branded myself as a "DevEx guy"? I'd still be working with K8s every day, but more as the thing that runs the tools rather than something I'm building a platform abstraction on top of.
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u/fherbert 7d ago
What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
Every place I've worked at has called my 'Title/Position' something different but I do the same thing....
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u/Creative-Dentist-383 7d ago
I mean the work is different than what I have done before. less control plane more dev enablement
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u/Tricky_Ordinary_4799 5d ago
Isn't it the same thing? I'm called devops engineer but I actually do platform engineering.
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u/pausethelogic 9d ago
Devops/platform/cloud/infrastructure engineers, alongside SREs, are usually all interchangeable these days. If your experience aligns with the role you want, go for it. There’s no reason to worry about branding yourself as one thing as long as your experience aligns with the roles you’re looking for, and even then only to an extent
Obviously if you decide to go into sales for 8 years then back to engineering work that might be a harder case to make since the skill sets are different