Platform Engineering

Overview

A 300+ engineer organisation had platform knowledge concentrated in a handful of senior engineers — new hires took months to ship their first production change, and every team solved the same infrastructure problems independently. This project built an Internal Developer Platform with AI-assisted golden paths.

The Challenge

Onboarding a new engineer to first production deploy averaged 6 weeks. Platform tickets backed up because requests required tribal knowledge nobody had documented. There was no consistent way to provision a new service — every team built its own slightly different version of the same thing.

Approach

• Built a Backstage developer portal as the single front door to the platform — service catalogue, templates, and documentation in one place
• Designed golden path templates — a new service, complete with CI/CD, observability, and security baselines, scaffolds in under 10 minutes
• Integrated an AI assistant (LLM-backed) into the portal for natural-language infra questions — trained on internal runbooks and architecture docs
• Introduced DORA metrics tracking dashboards so platform investment could be measured against actual engineering outcomes
• Built a network of platform champions across teams — a consultancy-style embedded model rather than a centralised bottleneck

Technology Stack

Results — Before vs. After