I spent about seven years working in internal IT and systems administration, managing services such as Google Workspace, Okta, and various MDM platforms. Three months ago, I moved into a platform engineering role at the same company.
Our setup is fairly decentralized: software engineers own and manage the infrastructure for their applications, while my manager and I provide higher-level platform support. My manager built most of the existing platform, so although the relatively low-pressure environment gives me time to learn, there are not many active projects for me to work on.
The biggest challenge is that I feel weak on some of the underlying fundamentals. I often use AI to help solve problems, and the result usually works, but I struggle to understand or troubleshoot things independently when I do not have that assistance. It is affecting my confidence and motivation.
Has anyone made a similar transition from internal IT or systems administration into platform engineering or DevOps? What would be a practical way to build the fundamentals, find useful projects, and use AI without becoming dependent on it?
4 Answers
Your existing systems administration experience is still useful, especially for identity, access, endpoint management, reliability, and operational processes. Build on that by learning networking, Linux, version control, scripting, cloud fundamentals, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and incident response in a small lab. Also review the current environment with the developers instead of waiting for large projects to appear. Experience comes from understanding real systems, not just completing isolated tutorials.
Being the only platform engineer without an experienced peer to learn from is probably the biggest difficulty here. Start by talking with the application and service owners. Ask what repeatedly slows them down, what is difficult to operate, and where deployments or troubleshooting cause pain. Treat those issues as your platform backlog and solve them one at a time. That gives you practical projects while making the team's work easier.
Three months is not very long when moving into a substantially different role. Try to understand what your manager actually expects from you and what responsibilities you own. With decentralized infrastructure, clarify boundaries, escalation paths, security controls, monitoring, backups, and cost ownership. Otherwise you may eventually be held responsible for systems you do not control.
Use AI as a tutor rather than an answer dispenser. When it suggests a solution, ask it to explain the underlying concepts, why each step is needed, and what could go wrong. Then recreate a small version yourself without copying the final answer. Keep notes on the tools and concepts you encounter, and revisit them until you can explain them in your own words.
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