Building Platform Engineering Teams That Scale

The Platform Engineering Moment

Platform engineering has emerged as a distinct discipline over the past few years. The core insight: as organizations scale, shared infrastructure and developer experience become force multipliers.

But the term is often misunderstood. Platform engineering isn't:

DevOps rebranded

A tool you can buy

Something every company needs immediately

It is: a discipline focused on building and maintaining internal platforms that enable product teams to ship faster and more reliably.

When to Invest

We advise portfolio companies to consider platform engineering when:

Engineering headcount exceeds 50-75: Below this, coordination costs are manageable. Above this, duplicated effort and divergent practices create drag.

Deployment friction is high: If shipping a feature requires coordinating across multiple teams or manual steps, there's platform opportunity.

Common problems are being solved repeatedly: Every team building their own auth, observability, or deployment pipeline indicates platform need.

Security/compliance requirements increase: Enterprise customers demand controls that are best implemented centrally.

Team Structure

We typically recommend starting with:

3-5 engineers, product-minded: Platform teams need people who think about users (developers) and products (internal tools), not just technology.

Clear charter: What is this team responsible for? What is explicitly out of scope? Ambiguity leads to conflict.

Internal SLAs: Treat other engineering teams as customers. Publish uptime, response time, and support expectations.

Feedback loops: Regular surveys, office hours, and embedded rotations to understand developer pain points.

Common Mistakes

Building Too Early

We've seen seed-stage companies hire platform engineers. This is premature. You don't have enough developers to need a platform, and you're not shipping enough to know what to standardize.

Building Without Buy-In

Platform teams imposed top-down fail. Developers route around mandates they resent. Start by solving real pain points, build credibility, then expand.

Optimizing for Purity Over Productivity

Some platform teams become architecture astronauts—building elegant systems no one uses. Measure adoption, not elegance.

Ignoring Migration Cost

A new CI system is useless if 200 existing pipelines can't migrate. Budget time and support for transitions, or adoption will stall.

What Good Looks Like

At maturity, a healthy platform engineering function:

Reduces time-to-first-deploy for new services to hours, not days

Provides observability, security, and compliance as default capabilities

Enables feature teams to focus on business logic, not infrastructure

Has high internal NPS and voluntary adoption

Operates as a product team, with roadmaps and prioritization

How We Help

For portfolio companies ready to invest in platform engineering, we provide:

Templates and playbooks from companies that have done this well

Access to our network of platform engineering leaders

Guidance on build vs. buy decisions

Help recruiting platform-oriented engineers

If you're a GASJ portfolio company thinking about platform engineering, reach out to your board partner or our platform team directly.