Platform engineering
Building internal tools and standard paths that make a company's own engineers faster, such as one-command service deployment.
What it tells you about a developer
Platform engineers are systems thinkers whose users were other engineers, a demanding audience, so strong ones pair infrastructure skill with product judgment. They come from larger companies by definition. Moving into a startup role, a platform engineer often becomes the person who builds the platform from the ground up instead of maintaining one others already built.
Platform teams treat their company's developers as customers. They build the shared foundation those developers work on: templates for new services, deployment pipelines, and internal tooling. It is the newest of the operations-adjacent titles and is typical at companies with 50 or more engineers. The skill set sits between infrastructure and backend.