Platform Engineering Services
Expert platform engineering services to create Internal Developer Platforms that transform productivity. From Backstage portals to golden paths to self-service infrastructure—we help you build the foundation for 10x developer experience.
Platform Engineering
Internal Developer Platform
Platform Capabilities
The Platform Engineering Imperative
Engineering teams spend too much time fighting infrastructure instead of building features. Platform engineering creates the foundation that lets developers focus on what matters—delivering value to customers, not wrestling with tooling.
New engineers take weeks to become productive. They struggle with environment setup, learn tribal knowledge, and wait for access requests—all before writing a single line of code.
Developers spend 30-40% of their time on infrastructure tasks. Managing Kubernetes, debugging CI/CD pipelines, and configuring cloud resources distracts from building features.
Without standardization, each team implements security differently. Some miss critical controls, creating audit findings and security vulnerabilities that put the business at risk.
Every team reinvents the wheel for deployment, monitoring, and incident response. No golden paths means duplicated effort, inconsistent quality, and operational chaos at scale.
A self-service platform that abstracts infrastructure complexity. Developers get pre-configured environments, automated pipelines, and guardrails—without tickets or waiting.
Paved roads for common workflows. Service templates, deployment pipelines, and infrastructure patterns that encode best practices and security requirements by default.
Treat the platform like a product with clear APIs, documentation, and SLAs. Product thinking ensures the platform serves developer needs and evolves based on feedback.
Optimize for developer productivity and satisfaction. Fast feedback loops, clear documentation, and minimal friction from idea to production deployment.
Our Services
We build and operate Internal Developer Platforms that transform how your teams build, deploy, and run software. Every platform is tailored to your organization's needs, tech stack, and maturity level.
Build a self-service platform that abstracts infrastructure complexity. Developers get everything they need—environments, pipelines, and services—through a unified portal without tickets or waiting.
Create standardized paths for common workflows that encode your organization's best practices. Templates for new services, deployment pipelines, and infrastructure ensure consistency without restricting flexibility.
Abstract away Kubernetes, cloud primitives, and infrastructure complexity. Platform APIs let developers deploy services without becoming infrastructure experts, while platform teams maintain control.
Bake security and compliance into the platform. Policy-as-code ensures every deployment meets security requirements. Developers get secure defaults without learning security intricacies.
Unified observability for all services on the platform. Pre-configured logging, metrics, and tracing give developers immediate visibility into their services without manual instrumentation.
Operate the platform like a product with defined SLAs, incident response, and continuous improvement. Platform reliability directly impacts developer productivity and business outcomes.
Ready to build your Internal Developer Platform? Let's discuss your platform strategy.
Get a Platform AssessmentOur Process
Platform engineering is a journey, not a destination. Our approach balances quick wins with sustainable platform development, ensuring you see value early while building for the long term.
We assess your current developer experience, tooling landscape, and platform maturity. Through developer interviews, tooling audits, and workflow analysis, we identify friction points and opportunities for platform investment.
Key Activities
Deliverables
Platform assessment report, developer journey maps, opportunity roadmap
We define your platform vision, principles, and target architecture. This includes identifying platform capabilities, selecting technology stack, and creating a phased roadmap that balances quick wins with long-term transformation.
Key Activities
Deliverables
Platform strategy document, target architecture, implementation roadmap
We build the platform foundation—core infrastructure, developer portal, and initial golden paths. The MVP delivers immediate value to early adopter teams while establishing patterns for future capabilities.
Key Activities
Deliverables
Platform MVP, developer documentation, onboarding guides
We iteratively expand platform capabilities based on developer feedback and adoption metrics. Each iteration adds new golden paths, improves developer experience, and expands self-service options.
Key Activities
Deliverables
New platform capabilities, expanded templates, improved developer portal
Platform success depends on adoption. We help drive adoption through training, documentation, champions programs, and measuring developer satisfaction. The platform evolves based on real usage patterns.
Key Activities
Deliverables
Training materials, champions network, adoption dashboards
We operate the platform as a product with defined SLAs, continuous improvement, and roadmap planning. Regular retrospectives and developer feedback drive platform evolution and ensure ongoing value delivery.
Key Activities
Deliverables
Platform SLAs, improvement backlog, evolution roadmap
Our platform engineering delivery is powered by SPARK™—our framework that brings predictability, quality gates, and transparent communication to platform initiatives. Every phase has defined outcomes, success metrics, and stakeholder checkpoints.
Technology Stack
We leverage the best open-source and commercial tools to build robust Internal Developer Platforms. Our team has deep expertise across the platform engineering ecosystem.
Internal developer platforms and service catalogs
Container orchestration and management
Declarative infrastructure management
Continuous integration and delivery pipelines
Logging, metrics, and tracing
Security automation and policy enforcement
Technology-agnostic approach: We help you choose the right tools for your context. Whether you're standardizing on Backstage or building a custom platform, we bring expertise to make it successful.
Why Platform Engineering
Platform engineering delivers transformative benefits for developer productivity, operational excellence, and business agility. Here's what organizations gain from investing in their Internal Developer Platform.
Eliminate infrastructure friction. Developers provision environments in minutes, not days. Self-service capabilities mean no waiting for tickets or approvals.
10x
Productivity improvement
New developers become productive in days, not weeks. Pre-configured environments, clear documentation, and golden paths eliminate tribal knowledge dependencies.
80%
Faster onboarding
Security controls are baked into the platform. Every deployment automatically meets security requirements through policy-as-code and guardrails.
100%
Policy compliance
Developers focus on business logic, not infrastructure. Platform abstraction hides complexity while maintaining the flexibility to dive deeper when needed.
40%
Less time on ops
Great developer experience improves retention and recruitment. Engineers want to work where tooling enables productivity rather than creating obstacles.
2x
Developer satisfaction
Standardized deployments, consistent monitoring, and repeatable processes reduce incidents and improve reliability across all services.
50%
Fewer incidents
From idea to production in hours, not weeks. Golden paths and automated pipelines accelerate the delivery of new features and services.
3x
Faster delivery
Platform capabilities scale across teams without linear headcount growth. One platform team can enable hundreds of developers.
1:50
Platform to dev ratio
Use Cases
Platform engineering delivers value across many scenarios. Here are the situations where platform investment has the highest impact.
Support Rapid Team Growth
Your engineering org is growing fast, but onboarding slows everyone down. Each new team recreates infrastructure patterns and struggles with inconsistent tooling across the organization.
Common Indicators
Create Consistency at Scale
Years of organic growth have created a sprawl of tooling, patterns, and practices. Different teams use different CI/CD systems, deployment approaches, and monitoring solutions.
Common Indicators
Enable Kubernetes Adoption
You've invested in Kubernetes but adoption is slow. Developers find it too complex, and each team builds custom deployment pipelines. The promise of cloud-native hasn't materialized.
Common Indicators
Improve Engineering Satisfaction
Developer surveys reveal frustration with tooling and processes. Engineers spend too much time on infrastructure tasks, and top talent is leaving for companies with better developer experience.
Common Indicators
Engagement Models
Whether you need a quick assessment, a pilot project, or a long-term partnership — we have an engagement model that fits your needs.
We analyze your codebase, processes, and team dynamics to identify bottlenecks and opportunities. You get a clear roadmap — no commitment required.
Ideal for: Teams wanting an objective assessment before committing
Learn moreStart with a focused pilot project. A small Pod works alongside your team on a real deliverable, so you can evaluate fit and capabilities with minimal risk.
Ideal for: Teams wanting to test the waters before scaling
Learn moreDedicated cross-functional teams that integrate with your organization. Full accountability for delivery with built-in QA, architecture reviews, and the SPARK™ framework.
Ideal for: Teams ready to scale with a trusted partner
Learn moreNeed specific skills? Augment your team with vetted engineers who work under your direction. React, Node, Python, AI engineers, and more.
Ideal for: Teams with clear requirements and strong internal leadership
Learn moreLet's talk about your goals, team structure, and timeline. We'll recommend the best way to start — with no pressure to commit.
Schedule a Free ConsultationPlatform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations. It's about creating a foundation—an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)—that abstracts away infrastructure complexity and allows developers to focus on building and delivering business value.
The goal is to improve developer productivity, reduce cognitive load, and standardize how software is built, deployed, and operated. Instead of every team solving the same infrastructure problems independently, platform engineering provides golden paths—opinionated, supported workflows that encode organizational best practices.
Platform engineering has emerged as a response to DevOps challenges at scale. While DevOps broke down silos between development and operations, it often shifted too much operational burden onto developers. Platform engineering provides the middle ground: giving developers autonomy and self-service while abstracting complexity they shouldn't need to manage.
According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools. This shift is driven by several factors:
An Internal Developer Platform is the concrete manifestation of platform engineering. It's a set of tools, services, and workflows that enable development teams to self-serve infrastructure and operational needs. A well-designed IDP includes:
Traditional infrastructure teams operate as gatekeepers—developers request resources, and infrastructure teams provision them. This creates bottlenecks and frustration. An IDP inverts this model: the platform team builds self-service capabilities, and developers consume them directly.
The platform team's role shifts from fulfilling requests to building products. They focus on improving the platform based on developer feedback, expanding capabilities, and ensuring reliability. This is a fundamental organizational change, not just a technology change.
Platform engineering and DevOps are complementary, not competing approaches. DevOps is a culture and set of practices that emphasizes collaboration between development and operations. Platform engineering is a discipline that implements DevOps principles through a product-oriented platform approach.
DevOps aimed to give developers ownership of the full lifecycle. In practice, this often created "you build it, you run it" without adequate tooling, overwhelming developers with operational complexity. Platform engineering addresses this by providing the infrastructure and automation that makes "you build it, you run it" actually feasible.
Think of platform engineering as "DevOps done right at scale." The principles are the same, but platform engineering provides the organizational structure and tooling to make those principles sustainable.
Golden paths are opinionated, supported workflows for common tasks. They represent the "right way" to do something within your organization. Rather than restricting developers, golden paths free them from having to make every low-level decision.
A golden path for creating a new microservice might include: service template with standard project structure, pre-configured CI/CD pipeline, automatic provisioning of monitoring and logging, default security configurations, and documentation generated automatically.
Backstage, originally developed by Spotify, has become the de facto standard for Internal Developer Portals. It provides a unified interface for developers to discover services, documentation, APIs, and platform capabilities. Backstage is now a CNCF incubating project with broad industry adoption.
While Backstage is popular, alternatives like Port, Cortex, OpsLevel, and Humanitec offer different approaches. Port provides a no-code builder for developer portals. Cortex focuses on scorecards and engineering standards. OpsLevel emphasizes service ownership and maturity. The right choice depends on your organization's needs and technical context.
Kubernetes has become the standard foundation for modern Internal Developer Platforms. Its declarative model, extensibility, and ecosystem make it ideal for building platform abstractions. However, raw Kubernetes is too complex for most developers—platform engineering provides the abstraction layer that makes Kubernetes accessible.
A typical Kubernetes-based platform includes:
Developers shouldn't need to write Kubernetes YAML. Good platform engineering abstracts Kubernetes behind higher-level interfaces—whether that's Helm charts with sensible defaults, custom resources with simplified schemas, or CI/CD pipelines that handle Kubernetes deployment automatically.
Platform teams operate differently from traditional infrastructure teams. They build products for internal customers (developers) and operate with product management discipline. This requires specific skills, organizational placement, and operating models.
The platform team should operate like a product team: sprint planning, roadmaps, user research, and continuous delivery. Developers are customers. Their satisfaction and productivity are the platform's success metrics. Regular feedback loops—surveys, office hours, feature requests—drive platform evolution.
Platform engineering capabilities mature over time. Understanding where you are helps prioritize investments and set realistic expectations.
Basic automation exists but is fragmented. Scripts, wikis, and tribal knowledge dominate. Each team solves infrastructure problems independently.
Central infrastructure team provides some standardization. CI/CD exists but varies by team. Documentation improves but is still scattered. This is where most organizations start their platform journey.
Platform team formed with clear mandate. Initial golden paths and templates exist. Developer portal provides single pane of glass. Self-service capabilities emerge for common tasks.
Platform operates with SLOs and metrics. Developer satisfaction measured and acted upon. Adoption tracked across teams. Continuous improvement based on data.
Platform is competitive advantage. Developers highly productive and satisfied. Platform capabilities expand based on strategic needs. Organization recognized for engineering excellence.
Salt brings deep expertise in platform engineering and the practical experience to make your platform initiative successful. Here's what sets us apart:
Platform-Native Expertise: Our engineers have built and operated platforms at scale. We understand the technology, patterns, and pitfalls. From Backstage to Kubernetes to Crossplane, we bring hands-on experience.
Product Thinking: We treat your platform as a product, not a project. User research, roadmap planning, and continuous improvement are built into how we work. Your developers are customers, and their success is our success.
Pragmatic Approach: We don't over-engineer. Your platform should solve real problems for your developers, not showcase every possible technology. We start with quick wins and expand based on demonstrated value.
End-to-End Capability: From strategy to implementation to operations, our managed pods handle the complete platform lifecycle. We can bootstrap your platform, help your team build capabilities, or operate the platform entirely.
SPARK™ Framework: Our SPARK™ framework brings structure to platform initiatives. Clear phases, quality gates, and success metrics ensure predictable delivery and stakeholder alignment.
Knowledge Transfer: We don't create dependencies. Every engagement includes documentation, training, and capability building so your team can own and evolve the platform independently.
Ready to accelerate your platform engineering journey? Schedule a platform assessment with our team to discuss your goals and how Salt can help you build the Internal Developer Platform your developers deserve.
Industries
We've built software for companies across industries. Our teams understand your domain's unique challenges, compliance requirements, and success metrics.
HIPAA-compliant digital health solutions. Patient portals, telehealth platforms, and healthcare data systems built right.
Scale your product fast without compromising on code quality. We help SaaS companies ship features quickly and build for growth.
Build secure, compliant financial software. From payment systems to trading platforms, we understand fintech complexity.
Platforms that convert and scale. Custom storefronts, inventory systems, and omnichannel experiences that drive revenue.
Optimize operations end-to-end. Route optimization, warehouse management, and real-time tracking systems.
Hire dedicated developers to extend your team
Whether you need to build a new product, modernize a legacy system, or add AI capabilities, our managed pods are ready to ship value from day one.
100+
Engineering Experts
800+
Projects Delivered
14+
Years in Business
4.9★
Clutch Rating
FAQs
Common questions about platform engineering, Internal Developer Platforms, and how to build great developer experiences.
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building Internal Developer Platforms that enable self-service for software teams. While DevOps is a cultural movement focused on collaboration between development and operations, platform engineering provides the tooling and infrastructure that makes DevOps practical at scale. Platform teams build products for developers, abstracting infrastructure complexity so developers can focus on building features.
An Internal Developer Platform is a set of tools, services, and workflows that enable development teams to self-serve their infrastructure and operational needs. It typically includes a developer portal for discovery and documentation, self-service infrastructure provisioning, golden paths (standardized templates), built-in observability, and security guardrails. The goal is to reduce developer friction and cognitive load while maintaining consistency and security.
Timeline depends on scope and starting point. An MVP platform with core capabilities (developer portal, initial golden paths, self-service provisioning) typically takes 3-6 months. Full platform maturity is a multi-year journey. We recommend starting small, delivering value quickly, and expanding capabilities based on developer feedback. Quick wins in the first 8-12 weeks build momentum and demonstrate ROI.
Organizations typically benefit from platform engineering when they have 50+ developers or multiple development teams. At this scale, ad-hoc infrastructure approaches create inconsistency, duplication of effort, and developer friction. However, even smaller teams can benefit from platform thinking—adopting golden paths and self-service patterns early sets a strong foundation for growth.
Backstage is the most popular open-source developer portal and a good default choice for most organizations. It's extensible, well-documented, and has a large community. However, alternatives like Port, Cortex, or OpsLevel may be better fits depending on your needs. Port offers a no-code approach, Cortex emphasizes scorecards, and OpsLevel focuses on service ownership. We help you evaluate options based on your context.
Developer buy-in comes from solving real problems. Start by understanding developer pain points through surveys and interviews. Build capabilities that address top friction areas. Make the platform easier than the alternative—if using golden paths is faster than rolling your own, adoption follows naturally. Involve developers in design decisions, celebrate early adopters, and iterate based on feedback.
Platform engineering ROI typically includes: 30-50% reduction in time spent on infrastructure tasks, 80% faster developer onboarding, 3x faster time-to-production for new services, 50% reduction in incidents through standardization, and improved developer satisfaction and retention. We help you define metrics and track ROI specific to your organization's goals.
Good golden paths are opinionated defaults, not restrictions. They provide the 'easy path' that works for 90% of cases. Developers can always customize when needed—the platform should make the common case effortless while allowing escape hatches for special requirements. The goal is to reduce unnecessary decisions, not eliminate all decisions.
Platform teams need a mix of skills: infrastructure/cloud expertise (Kubernetes, cloud platforms, IaC), software engineering skills (building reliable, maintainable systems), product management (understanding user needs, roadmap planning), and developer empathy (understanding how developers work and what frustrates them). Platform engineering is fundamentally a product discipline applied to internal tooling.
Platform engineering embeds security and compliance into the platform itself. Policy-as-code (OPA, Kyverno) enforces rules automatically. Golden paths include secure defaults. Secret management is automated. Security scanning runs in pipelines by default. This 'shift-left' approach catches issues early and ensures compliance without manual review gates that slow delivery.
Most successful platforms combine building and buying. Use managed services (cloud providers, SaaS tools) where possible—don't rebuild monitoring or CI/CD. Build the integration layer and customizations specific to your organization. Open-source tools like Backstage and Crossplane provide foundations to build upon. We help you design the right build/buy mix for your context.
Key metrics include: developer satisfaction (NPS, surveys), platform adoption rate, time-to-production for new services, developer onboarding time, incident reduction, and developer time spent on infrastructure vs. features. Define SLOs for the platform itself (availability, performance of developer tools). Regular retrospectives with development teams provide qualitative feedback.
Existing automation is a starting point, not a blocker. We assess your current tooling, identify what's working, and integrate it into the platform architecture. Often, existing scripts and pipelines become golden paths with some refinement. Platform engineering isn't about starting over—it's about systematizing and scaling what works.