DevOps Engineer vs. Platform Engineer vs. SRE: What’s the Difference?
As a DevOps engineer and a non-native English speaker, I often see confusion between DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and site reliability engineers (SREs). These roles are connected but different. In this post, I want to explain the key points, responsibilities, and how they work together.
1. DevOps Engineer
Main Focus: Collaboration and automation between development and operations.
Responsibilities:
- Build CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
- Automate deployments and infrastructure (Terraform, Ansible, Helm)
- Monitor applications and infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Bridge communication between developers and sysadmins
Goal: Faster, reliable delivery of software.
2. Platform Engineer
Main Focus: Build and maintain an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to support developers.
Responsibilities:
- Create self-service tools for developers (Kubernetes clusters, service templates)
- Provide golden paths (standard solutions for logging, monitoring, networking)
- Manage scalability of platform (cloud-native infrastructure)
- Maintain developer experience (easy onboarding, faster deployments)
Goal: Make developers more productive and reduce cognitive load.
3. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Main Focus: Reliability and uptime of systems.
Responsibilities:
- Define SLI/SLO/SLA (Service Level Indicators, Objectives, Agreements)
- Incident response and postmortems
- Chaos engineering and stress testing
- Reliability automation (auto-healing systems, scaling policies)
Goal: Keep systems reliable, stable, and cost-efficient.
4. Comparison Table
| Role | Main Focus | Key Tools | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| DevOps Engineer | Collaboration, Automation | GitLab, Jenkins, Terraform | Deliver software faster and safer |
| Platform Engineer | Internal Dev Platform | Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD | Developer productivity, golden paths |
| SRE | Reliability, Operations | Prometheus, PagerDuty | Reliable and scalable systems |
5. Visual Comparison
Responsibilities Overlap Chart
- DevOps Engineer → Delivery pipelines, automation
- Platform Engineer → Developer platform, scalability
- SRE → Reliability, incident management
[DevOps] -----------
\
\---> Shared Automation
/
[Platform] ------ [SRE]
All three roles share automation and cloud knowledge but apply them in different areas.
6. Who Manages CI/CD?
- DevOps engineers: Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines.
- Platform engineers: Provide standardized CI/CD as a service.
- SREs: Ensure pipelines are reliable and meet SLAs.
Conclusion
- DevOps Engineer = Focus on delivery and collaboration.
- Platform Engineer = Focus on building internal tools for developers.
- SRE = Focus on keeping services reliable and available.
Together, these three roles complement each other. In modern organizations, you may see DevOps + Platform + SRE teams working side by side to ensure smooth development, strong platforms, and reliable systems.