Bookmark of So You Want to Hire for Platform Engineering?

I have done a lot of interviews for DevOps/Infrastructure/Platform roles. Only a handful of them have actually been good.

Below are my notes from Hazel Weakly’s KubeCon EU 2025 talk. I encourage you to go watch their full presentation.

# Core Qualities to look for

• Rebound – Can you bounce back when things go sideways?
• Robustness – Can your system handle disruption?
• Graceful Extensibility – How well does your system stretch to meet surprises?
• Sustained Adaptability – Can you manage your capacity to adapt over time?

These qualities map pretty naturally to team types. At first, it might all be one team. As you grow, it splits:

• Rebound → SRE
• Robustness → Infrastructure
• Graceful Extensibility → Platform Engineering
• Sustained Adaptability → Developer Experience

A couple bonus traits Hazel called out that I really liked:

• Intellectual humility – Willing to say “I don’t know”, open to new ideas, happy to be corrected
• Ecological awe – Sees and respects the bigger system

# A Healthier Hiring Process

1. Let’s get to know each other
2. Let’s solve a technical problem together
3. Let’s solve a sociotechnical problem together
4. Let’s see how you interact with your future teammates and stakeholders

Keep the whole process under two weeks, end to end.

# Interview Red Flags

• Interviews are not a hazing ritual
• Track how folks perform after they are hired
• Every engineer on the team should be able to pass the interview with no prep
• Whiteboard coding is worse than useless

If You are Screening For:

• “Passion” → You are screening for people who put up with abuse
• “Side projects” → You are screening for people who make their wife/partner raise the kids