Platform Engineering vs. SRE: You're Hiring for the Wrong Role. Here’s the Difference.

Published: 26 December 2025

As companies scale their cloud-native operations, a common point of confusion and friction emerges in organizational design: the distinction between Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Many leaders use the terms interchangeably, writing job descriptions that blend the two roles, and hiring engineers who are set up for failure. This confusion is understandable, as both roles are crucial for building and maintaining reliable, scalable software systems. However, they are not the same.

Failing to understand the difference between Platform Engineering and SRE leads to misaligned expectations, organizational gaps, and ultimately, a failure to achieve both development velocity and operational stability. You end up with a team that is trying to do two very different jobs at once, and excelling at neither. To build a truly effective engineering organization, you must understand that you are not just hiring for two different skill sets; you are hiring for two different mindsets.

Put simply:

• Platform Engineering builds the road.
• Site Reliability Engineering keeps the traffic flowing smoothly.

One is the architect, the other is the firefighter. One focuses on the developer experience, the other on the end-user experience.

The Architect: The Platform Engineering Team

The Platform Engineering team has one primary customer: your internal developers. Their job is to build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that makes it as easy as possible for developers to build, ship, and run their applications. They are the architects and builders of the “paved road.”

The product that a platform team builds is the platform itself. Their work is measured by:

• Developer Velocity: How quickly can a new developer be onboarded and ship their first change to production?
• Cognitive Load: How much do developers need to know about the underlying infrastructure to do their jobs? (The less, the better).
• Adoption Rate: Are development teams willingly and eagerly using the platform?

A platform engineer’s mindset is that of a product manager. They are obsessed with their customer’s (the developer’s) journey. They conduct user interviews, gather feedback, and iteratively improve the platform to reduce friction and improve the developer experience. They provide the standardized tools, services, and automated workflows—CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks, self-service infrastructure provisioning—that allow development teams to move quickly and safely. Their focus is before deployment.

The Firefighter: The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Team

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team has one primary customer: your end-users. Their job is to ensure that the services running in production are reliable, performant, and available. They are the guardians of the end-user experience. While the platform team builds the road, the SRE team is the emergency service that responds when there’s a crash.

The product that an SRE team delivers is reliability. Their work is measured by:

• Service Level Objectives (SLOs): Are we meeting our uptime and performance promises to our users?
• Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR): When an incident occurs, how quickly can we restore service?
• Error Budgets: How much unreliability are we allowed to have before we must stop all new feature development and focus exclusively on stability?

An SRE’s mindset is that of a first responder and a systems thinker. They are experts in incident response, diving deep into complex distributed systems to find the root cause of a problem. But they are not just firefighters. A core tenet of SRE is that 50% of their time should be spent on “toil reduction”—automating the manual, repetitive tasks that are a natural byproduct of running systems at scale. They perform blameless post-mortems to learn from every incident, and they use that knowledge to make the system more resilient. Their focus is after deployment.

Why You Need Both

Confusing these two roles leads to predictable failures. If you ask your SRE team to also build the developer platform, their proactive, long-term platform-building work will always be preempted by the reactive, urgent-firefighting work of incident response. The platform will never get built.

Conversely, if you ask your platform team to be on-call for production incidents, their focus will be split. They won’t be able to dedicate the time and energy required to build a truly world-class developer experience. They will be constantly context-switching between building the road and fixing the crashes.

A healthy engineering organization needs both teams, working in close collaboration. The platform team provides the SRE team with a standardized, observable environment, which makes it easier to diagnose and fix problems. The SRE team provides the platform team with invaluable feedback from the front lines of production, helping them to build a more resilient and reliable platform.

Structuring these teams correctly is the secret to scaling your operations. It allows you to achieve both speed and stability, empowering your developers to innovate while ensuring that your customers have a world-class experience.

As a Technical Consultancy, Aqon specializes in helping organizations with modern organizational design. We can help you define the right roles, structure your teams for success, and hire the right talent to build a high-performing engineering culture.

Stop hiring for the wrong role. Contact us today to learn how we can help you build distinct and effective Platform and SRE teams.

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