DevOps and platform engineers are among the hardest roles to hire in most markets. At the same time, every product team depends on them for pipelines, environments and production reliability. Many organisations solve this by building an offshore DevOps team or platform engineering team.
This guide explains how to structure, hire and run one successfully.
DevOps and platform engineers are among the hardest roles to hire in most markets.
What is the difference between DevOps and platform engineering?
DevOps is a culture and set of practices that bring development and operations together to deliver software faster and more reliably. Platform engineering is a discipline that builds an internal developer platform (IDP), a set of self-service tools and "golden paths" that let developers build, deploy and run software without needing to master every infrastructure detail.
Platform teams are often how organisations scale DevOps practices across many product teams.
What does a platform team own?
| Area | Examples |
|---|---|
| CI/CD | Pipelines in GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins or Argo CD |
| Infrastructure as code | Terraform modules, Ansible, policy-as-code |
| Container platform | Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters, service templates |
| Observability | Metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting (guide) |
| Security guardrails | Image scanning (e.g., Trivy), policy enforcement (e.g., Kyverno), secrets management |
| Developer experience | Templates, documentation, self-service portals |
| Cost guardrails | Tagging, rightsizing, budget alerts (FinOps) |
What roles does an offshore platform team need?
- Platform/DevOps lead: owns roadmap, standards and stakeholder relationships
- Senior platform engineers: Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, cloud architecture
- Site reliability engineers (SRE): reliability, SLOs, incident response
- Cloud security engineer: guardrails, identity, compliance automation
- Developer experience engineer (as the team grows): templates, docs, portal
Start with three to five senior engineers before adding mid-level roles.
What a platform engineering team owns
Illustration in progress
How do you run a platform team as a product?
- Identify customers: your product engineering teams.
- Measure their pain: slow pipelines, environment waits, unclear deployment steps.
- Build golden paths for the most common workloads first.
- Publish a roadmap and gather feedback regularly.
- Measure adoption and satisfaction, not just tickets closed.
Which metrics show the platform is working?
| Metric | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | How often teams can ship |
| Lead time for changes | Commit to production speed |
| Change failure rate | Release quality |
| Time to restore service | Recovery capability |
| Golden path adoption | Platform usefulness |
| Developer satisfaction | Experience quality |
The first four are the widely used DORA metrics.
DORA metrics for platform engineering
Illustration in progress
How do you integrate an offshore platform team?
- Embed platform engineers in product team planning periodically
- Use shared channels for platform support with clear response times
- Share on-call rotations across time zones for follow-the-sun coverage
- Document everything: runbooks, architecture decisions, golden path guides
- Design a daily overlap window for collaboration
How Crozaint approaches platform teams
Crozaint staffs dedicated engineering pods across platform, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, security, data, AI/ML, QA and software engineering. Our engineers work with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, Argo CD, Kyverno and Trivy across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
They integrate into your backlog, standups and code review, report to your engineering leadership and are hired with your approval. Crozaint helped WildHerbs, a table-reservation platform, achieve 70% faster release cycles with a scalable Azure CI/CD pipeline. Because Crozaint also runs managed cloud operations and observability, platform teams can be backed by 24/7 operations if needed.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Hiring a "DevOps team" that becomes a ticket queue
- Building a platform nobody asked for
- Starting with junior engineers on critical infrastructure
- No DORA or developer satisfaction metrics
- Separating platform and product teams completely
Conclusion
An offshore platform team can become the engine of your delivery speed. Treat the platform as a product, hire senior, measure DORA metrics and integrate deeply with product teams.
Building a platform or DevOps team? Talk to an engineering advisor at Crozaint.
