Ask HN: What’s a Platform Engineer Role?

Yes and no. Platform engineers are generally very skilled developers+ devops that are able to built internal solutions for their colleagues (developers) to be able to deploy to production more effectively. So, basically, a platform engineer is removing obstacles and improving efficiency of your CI/CD pipelines. This can be done with workflows, UIs, etc. A cloud engineer will be able to manage cloud deployments, but may not be able to build these internal tools effectively.

Platform engineering can mean adapting something for a platform. For example a platform engineer may take an application and ensuring it works on Linux, Mac and Windows. That can mean coding, as well a deploying the CI/CD that ensures it is built, tested and published across platforms.

best I figure it's what used to be called "sysadmin" — someone who stands up and maintains infra for the benefit of product engineers?