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QuickHire

Enterprise Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering Services That Accelerate Developer Velocity at Scale

We design, build, and operate internal developer platforms that give your engineering teams self-service access to infrastructure, golden paths, and tooling - reducing cognitive load and compressing lead time from weeks to hours. Our platform engineering consultants bring deep expertise in Backstage, Kubernetes platform design, service mesh, and developer experience across large, complex enterprise environments.

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500+
Enterprise Clients
10,000+
Engineers Deployed
50+
Countries Served
99.4%
CSAT Score
48h
Team Assembly

The Challenge

Developer Toil is Throttling Your Engineering Organisation

As engineering organisations scale, the gap between infrastructure complexity and developer capability grows into a productivity crisis. Developers spend an increasing proportion of their time navigating bespoke toolchains, waiting for infrastructure provisioning, and deciphering inconsistent deployment practices rather than building product features. Without a coherent platform strategy, organisations accumulate technical debt in their developer experience that compounds with every new hire and every new service.

40%
of developer time lost to infrastructure toil in organisations without an IDP
3x
longer lead time for organisations lacking self-service platform capabilities
$2M+
annual productivity cost of fragmented toolchains in mid-size engineering organisations
68%
of engineers report that poor developer experience impacts their job satisfaction

Why QuickHire

Why Enterprises Choose QuickHire

01

Platform-as-a-Product Mindset

We treat your internal developer platform as a product with engineers as customers, applying rigorous product management disciplines to ensure the platform continuously delivers value. Developer NPS, adoption rates, and productivity metrics drive every roadmap decision.

02

Backstage Implementation Expertise

Our teams have deployed and customised Backstage across dozens of enterprise environments, building proprietary plugins, integrating enterprise identity providers, and populating service catalogs with thousands of services. We know the pitfalls and the patterns that work at scale.

03

Kubernetes Platform Architecture

We design multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms with namespace-as-a-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and workload identity that abstract away infrastructure complexity without sacrificing control. Our architectures are built for enterprise-grade reliability and compliance.

04

Golden Path Engineering

We craft opinionated software templates and scaffolding workflows that encode your organisation best practices for security, observability, and deployment. New services launch in minutes with every organisational standard already in place.

05

Security-First Platform Design

Security controls are embedded into platform abstractions and golden paths rather than bolted on as post-development gates. Policy-as-code, automated image scanning, and secrets management are platform defaults that application teams inherit automatically.

06

Measurable Developer Experience Improvement

We establish DORA baselines before engagement start and track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery time throughout. Our engagements deliver demonstrable improvements in engineering throughput that are visible to leadership.

Challenges

Common Enterprise Pain Points

01

Fragmented Toolchains Create Organisational Debt

Organisations that allow each team to choose their own CI/CD tools, infrastructure provisioning methods, and deployment workflows accumulate toolchain sprawl that makes it impossible to enforce standards, move engineers between teams, or implement organisation-wide improvements efficiently. Each bespoke setup becomes a silo that resists standardisation and slows every cross-cutting initiative.

02

Infrastructure Teams Cannot Scale to Meet Developer Demand

Centralised infrastructure and operations teams become bottlenecks as organisations grow, fielding hundreds of provisioning requests that require manual review and approval. Without self-service capabilities, developer lead time is bounded by infrastructure team capacity regardless of how many engineers are hired.

03

Cognitive Load Degrades Engineering Quality

When developers must master Kubernetes resource definitions, cloud IAM policies, Terraform modules, and observability configuration alongside their product domain knowledge, the cognitive overhead degrades code quality and increases burnout. Platform engineering lifts this burden by providing higher-level, opinionated abstractions that encode organisational decisions correctly by default.

04

Inconsistent Practices Amplify Security and Compliance Risk

Without standardised deployment pipelines and infrastructure patterns, security controls are applied inconsistently across services, creating gaps that are difficult to audit and remediate. Compliance evidence collection becomes a manual, error-prone exercise when each team has implemented controls differently.

05

Onboarding New Engineers Takes Weeks Instead of Days

Organisations without a well-designed internal developer platform struggle to onboard new engineers efficiently, requiring weeks of informal knowledge transfer before a new hire can deploy their first change to production. Poor onboarding compounds attrition and slows the return on investment from every engineering hire.

Our Approach

A Purpose-Built Internal Developer Platform That Scales With Your Organisation

Our platform engineering practice designs and delivers internal developer platforms anchored in Backstage, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code that give your development teams a consistent, self-service path from code to production. We apply platform-as-a-product thinking to ensure the platform drives adoption and delivers measurable improvements in engineering velocity, developer satisfaction, and operational reliability.

01
Developer Portal and Service Catalog
A production-grade Backstage deployment populated with your service catalog, integrated with your identity provider and toolchain, and extended with custom plugins that surface the information developers need most.
02
Self-Service Infrastructure and Golden Paths
Backstage software templates and scaffolding workflows that provision compliant, production-ready services - complete with CI/CD pipelines, observability, and secrets management - in minutes rather than days.
03
Kubernetes Platform and Service Mesh
A multi-cluster Kubernetes platform with namespace-as-a-service provisioning, policy enforcement, and optionally a service mesh layer that delivers mTLS, traffic management, and distributed tracing as platform capabilities.
04
Platform Observability and Developer Metrics
Pre-configured dashboards, alerting templates, and DORA metric tracking embedded into the platform so teams can measure and improve their delivery performance continuously against organisational targets.

Delivery Models

How We Deliver

Platform Foundation

Rapid delivery of a production-ready IDP foundation including Backstage deployment, service catalog population, two to three golden path templates, and Kubernetes platform hardening.

Timeline
8 weeks
Team Size
3-4 engineers
Full Platform Build

Comprehensive platform engineering engagement covering IDP, self-service infrastructure, service mesh, observability platform, and security policy automation with full documentation and team enablement.

Timeline
16 weeks
Team Size
5-7 engineers
Embedded Platform Team

Ongoing embedded platform engineering support that augments your internal team with experienced platform engineers who drive continuous platform improvement and capability expansion.

Timeline
Ongoing
Team Size
2-4 engineers

Capabilities

Technical Capability Matrix

Developer Portal and Catalog
Backstage deployment and customisationService catalog population and governancePlugin developmentTechDocs setupSoftware templates and scaffolding
Kubernetes Platform
Multi-cluster architectureCluster API and CrossplaneNamespace-as-a-serviceOPA Gatekeeper and KyvernoWorkload identity management
Infrastructure Automation
Terraform and Pulumi IaCSelf-service provisioning workflowsCost attribution and guardrailsTTL-based resource cleanupGitOps with Flux and ArgoCD
Observability and Developer Experience
OpenTelemetry instrumentationPrometheus and ThanosDistributed tracing with TempoDORA metrics dashboardsBackstage scorecards

Engagement Models

How We Engage

Choose the model that fits your programme governance, budget cycle, and team structure.

01

Staff Augmentation

Engineers embed directly under your management.

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02

Dedicated Developers

Full-time team aligned to your product roadmap.

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03

Managed Teams

End-to-end delivery with SLA-backed outcomes.

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04

Engineering Pods

Autonomous cross-functional pods per domain.

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05

Offshore Dev Centre

Permanent engineering base in India. Full IP ownership.

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06

Build-Operate-Transfer

We build and run it. You take ownership on schedule.

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Our Process

From Discovery to Delivery

1

Discovery and Assessment

Week 1

We conduct structured workshops with engineering leadership and developer teams to audit the current toolchain, measure toil and lead time, and identify the highest-value platform capabilities to prioritise.

2

Platform Architecture Design

Weeks 1-2

Our architects produce a detailed platform design covering IDP architecture, Kubernetes platform topology, self-service capability roadmap, and security control mapping - reviewed and approved by your engineering leadership.

3

Foundation Deployment

Weeks 3-6

We deploy Backstage and the Kubernetes platform foundation in your environment, establish CI/CD for the platform itself, and populate the service catalog with existing services.

4

Golden Paths and Self-Service Capabilities

Weeks 7-14

We build and release golden path templates, self-service infrastructure workflows, and Backstage plugins aligned with the prioritised roadmap, running regular developer feedback sessions throughout.

5

Enablement and Handover

Ongoing

We conduct structured knowledge transfer, publish platform runbooks in TechDocs, and provide retained support to ensure your internal team can operate and extend the platform confidently.

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Security & Compliance

Enterprise-Grade Security by Default

✓ISO 27001 Certified✓SOC 2 Type II Ready✓GDPR Compliant✓DPDP Act Ready✓NDA on Day 1✓MSA Available✓IP Assignment Clauses✓Escrow Options

Governance

Programme Governance

✓

Platform Product Council

A governing body including engineering leadership, platform team leads, and developer representatives that reviews the platform roadmap quarterly and prioritises capabilities based on adoption data and developer feedback.

✓

Golden Path Review Process

A structured review and approval workflow for new and updated golden path templates that ensures security, compliance, and architectural standards are validated before templates are published to the developer portal.

✓

Policy-as-Code Enforcement

All platform policies covering image provenance, network segmentation, resource quotas, and secrets handling are codified and enforced automatically at admission time, with policy violations logged for audit.

✓

Platform SLA and On-Call

The platform team maintains defined SLAs for IDP availability and self-service provisioning, with a rotating on-call schedule and documented escalation paths for platform incidents.

Team Structure

Your Enterprise Team

Our platform engineering engagements are staffed with senior practitioners who have operated internal developer platforms in production at enterprise scale. Teams combine platform architects, Backstage specialists, Kubernetes platform engineers, and a platform product manager who owns developer experience metrics and roadmap alignment throughout the engagement.

✓Platform Engineering Lead
✓Backstage Developer
✓Kubernetes Platform Engineer
✓Infrastructure Automation Engineer
✓Service Mesh Specialist
✓Platform Security Engineer
✓Developer Experience Product Manager
✓Site Reliability Engineer

Project Lifecycle

From Kickoff to Production

01
1-2 weeks

Discovery and Audit

Toolchain audit report, developer experience survey results, toil measurement baseline, and prioritised platform capability roadmap.

02
1-2 weeks

Architecture and Design

Platform architecture document, Backstage customisation plan, Kubernetes platform topology, golden path specifications, and security control mapping.

03
4-6 weeks

Foundation Build

Production Backstage deployment, populated service catalog, Kubernetes platform with policy enforcement, and initial CI/CD pipeline templates.

04
6-10 weeks

Platform Expansion

Self-service infrastructure workflows, golden path templates, service mesh deployment, observability platform, and DORA metrics dashboards.

05
Ongoing

Enablement and Steady State

Platform runbooks in TechDocs, operator training, adoption reporting, roadmap refinement, and retained engineering support.

Case Studies

Enterprise Outcomes

Financial Services

A global bank with 800 developers was losing an estimated 35% of engineering capacity to infrastructure provisioning delays and inconsistent deployment practices across 12 product lines.

We delivered a Backstage-powered IDP with self-service environment provisioning, eight golden path templates covering microservices and data pipelines, and Kubernetes namespace-as-a-service across three cloud regions.

62%reduction in lead time for changes within six months of platform launch
Insurance and InsurTech

A rapidly scaling InsurTech needed to onboard 150 new engineers over 12 months without degrading delivery quality or overwhelming a small platform team.

We built a developer portal with guided onboarding workflows, automated developer environment provisioning, and a comprehensive service catalog that reduced new engineer time-to-first-deployment from three weeks to two days.

87%faster new engineer onboarding with consistent quality
Retail and E-Commerce

A large retailer operating 400 microservices had no consistent observability or service ownership visibility, making incident response slow and costly during peak trading periods.

We deployed Backstage with a fully populated service catalog, implemented OpenTelemetry-based observability as a platform default, and built Backstage scorecards that tracked SLO compliance and ownership completeness for every service.

45%reduction in mean time to restore during production incidents

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Hiring Models

One platform, two ways to hire

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Both models use the same vetted talent network · PM always included · Multi-country billing

Frequently Asked Questions

Platform engineering is a discipline that builds and operates internal developer platforms as products consumed by application development teams. Unlike traditional DevOps, which focuses on process improvement between development and operations teams, platform engineering creates reusable infrastructure abstractions, self-service capabilities, and golden paths that allow developers to provision, deploy, and operate services without deep infrastructure expertise. The goal is to reduce cognitive load on developers, eliminate bottlenecks caused by centralised operations teams, and accelerate time-to-market across the entire engineering organisation. Platform teams own the developer experience as a product and iterate on it based on developer feedback and measurable productivity metrics.
An Internal Developer Platform is a curated set of tools, workflows, and services that platform teams build and maintain so that developers can self-serve infrastructure, deployments, and operational concerns. Core components typically include a service catalog and developer portal such as Backstage, self-service environment provisioning, CI/CD pipeline templates, secrets management, observability tooling, and software templates for golden paths. Additional layers often cover policy enforcement, cost attribution, compliance guardrails, and runtime platform abstractions built on Kubernetes. A well-designed IDP reduces the time developers spend on infrastructure toil from days to minutes and provides a single pane of glass for discovering and managing services across the organisation.
Backstage, originally developed at Spotify and now a CNCF incubating project, has become the de facto standard for enterprise developer portals because it provides a flexible plugin architecture that integrates with virtually any toolchain. It centralises service catalog management, technical documentation, software templates, and third-party tool integrations in a single extensible interface. Large enterprises value Backstage because it is open-source with a thriving plugin ecosystem, supports custom authentication with enterprise identity providers, and can be extended to surface cost data, SLO dashboards, on-call rotations, and deployment status alongside service ownership information. Our teams have extensive experience deploying, customising, and operating Backstage at scale across organisations with thousands of services.
Golden paths are opinionated, pre-approved workflows and software templates that encode organisational best practices for building, deploying, and operating services. When a developer uses a golden path, they receive a fully scaffolded project with security controls, CI/CD pipelines, observability instrumentation, and compliance guardrails already in place - eliminating weeks of boilerplate setup. Golden paths reduce the number of decisions developers must make on non-differentiating concerns, ensuring consistency across services and making it far easier for teams to adopt platform capabilities correctly. Well-maintained golden paths also accelerate onboarding of new engineers by providing a clear, supported starting point rather than requiring deep institutional knowledge.
We treat the internal developer platform as a product with developers as customers, applying product management disciplines including roadmap planning, user research, success metrics, and iterative release cycles. Our engagement begins with structured discovery workshops to understand developer pain points, measure current toil and lead time, and identify the highest-value capabilities to build first. We establish platform product councils to align leadership priorities with developer needs, define platform SLAs, and set measurable adoption and satisfaction targets such as developer NPS and deployment frequency. Throughout the engagement, we track platform adoption metrics and hold regular developer office hours and feedback sessions to continuously improve the product.
Our platform engineering teams design and operate production-grade Kubernetes platforms spanning multi-cluster federation, namespace-as-a-service provisioning, cluster lifecycle management with tools like Cluster API or Crossplane, and policy enforcement with OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno. We implement workload identity management with IRSA or Workload Identity, configure resource quotas and admission controllers, and build operator-based abstractions that hide Kubernetes complexity from application teams. We also manage Kubernetes version upgrade strategies, node pool automation, and capacity planning to ensure the platform scales reliably with business growth. Our teams are experienced with EKS, GKE, AKS, and on-premises Kubernetes distributions.
Service mesh adoption is planned as a platform capability rather than a team-by-team initiative, ensuring consistent rollout and governance across the application estate. We evaluate mesh options - typically Istio, Linkerd, or Cilium - based on the client environment, performance requirements, and operational maturity, then implement a phased adoption roadmap that starts with sidecar injection policies and mTLS enforcement before layering on traffic management and observability. Golden path templates are updated to include mesh annotations so new services automatically benefit from mutual TLS, distributed tracing, and circuit breaking without developer intervention. We provide runbooks, dashboards, and escalation paths to ensure platform teams can operate the mesh confidently in production.
Self-service infrastructure capabilities we commonly build include on-demand environment provisioning for development, staging, and preview environments; database provisioning through operators or Crossplane compositions; secret management integration with Vault or cloud-native secret stores; and service account and IAM role provisioning aligned with least-privilege policies. We build Backstage software templates and scaffolder actions that trigger Terraform or Pulumi automation, giving developers a form-based interface to provision approved infrastructure patterns without writing IaC directly. All self-service resources are tagged for cost attribution, subject to budget guardrails, and automatically deprovisioned based on TTL policies to control cloud spend.
A baseline Backstage deployment with service catalog population, GitHub or GitLab integration, and initial software templates can be production-ready within four to six weeks for most enterprise environments. Full customisation including authentication with enterprise SSO, plugin development for internal tools, TechDocs setup, and integration with CI/CD and observability platforms typically requires an additional six to ten weeks depending on the breadth of the existing toolchain. We follow a phased approach that delivers value quickly - launching with a populated catalog and two to three golden path templates before expanding to advanced capabilities - so development teams see productivity gains well before the full platform is complete.
Platform engineering reduces cognitive load by abstracting away infrastructure complexity behind curated, opinionated interfaces and pre-configured workflows. Developers no longer need to understand Kubernetes resource definitions, cloud IAM policies, or Terraform module interdependencies to deploy and operate their services - they interact with higher-level abstractions that encode organisational decisions correctly by default. Consolidated developer portals replace scattered wikis, runbooks, and Slack channels with a single source of truth for service ownership, documentation, and operational status. Research from Humanitec and DORA consistently shows that teams with mature internal developer platforms deploy more frequently, experience fewer change failure rates, and report higher job satisfaction than those without platform support.
Our platform engineering engagements include an observability foundation that provides application teams with pre-configured dashboards, alerting templates, and distributed tracing out of the box when they use golden paths. We typically deploy OpenTelemetry collectors as a platform component, standardise on a metrics backend such as Prometheus with Thanos for long-term retention, and integrate distributed tracing with Jaeger or Tempo. Platform-level developer experience metrics - including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore - are surfaced in Backstage scorecards so teams can benchmark their performance against organisational targets. We also instrument the platform itself to track adoption rates, template usage, and self-service success rates as platform health indicators.
Security is embedded into golden paths and platform abstractions rather than enforced as a gate after development. We implement policy-as-code with OPA or Kyverno to automatically block non-compliant workloads from reaching production, integrate container image scanning with Trivy or Snyk into CI/CD pipelines as a platform default, and enforce secrets hygiene through Vault integration in all software templates. Compliance controls such as audit logging, data residency constraints, and network segmentation are implemented at the platform layer so application teams inherit compliance by default. Our teams work closely with information security and compliance functions to map regulatory requirements to platform controls and maintain evidence artefacts for audit purposes.
A mature platform engineering function at enterprise scale typically includes a platform product manager who owns the roadmap and developer experience metrics, a platform tech lead who sets architectural direction, and a team of platform engineers covering infrastructure automation, developer tooling, and security. Organisations with significant Kubernetes footprints often add a dedicated cluster reliability engineer role, while those with complex compliance requirements may include a platform security engineer. We recommend a ratio of roughly one platform engineer per fifteen to twenty application engineers, though this varies significantly based on platform maturity and the breadth of self-service capabilities offered. Our engagements can embed experienced platform engineers into your team to accelerate capability building while transferring knowledge to permanent staff.
Migration to a unified platform begins with a comprehensive toolchain audit that maps current tools, manual processes, and pain points across development, operations, and security teams. We use this to identify high-frequency workflows where standardisation will deliver the greatest productivity gains and build a phased migration roadmap that avoids disrupting teams during critical delivery periods. Early phases typically focus on populating the service catalog with existing services and establishing the Backstage portal as the authoritative source of service ownership before migrating CI/CD pipelines to platform-managed templates. We maintain backward compatibility with existing workflows during the transition period and provide migration guides and office hours to help teams adopt platform capabilities at their own pace.
Enterprise platform engineering success should be measured across three dimensions: developer productivity, platform adoption, and platform reliability. Productivity metrics drawn from DORA research - deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore - provide the clearest signal of whether the platform is accelerating safe delivery. Adoption metrics including the percentage of services using platform templates, active Backstage users, and self-service request fulfillment rates indicate whether developers find the platform valuable enough to use. Platform reliability metrics such as IDP availability, time to provision a new service environment, and time to onboard a new developer capture the operational quality of the platform itself, and we help clients establish baseline measurements before engagement start so improvements can be quantified clearly.
Knowledge transfer is built into every phase of our platform engineering engagements rather than treated as a final handover activity. We use an embedded pairing model where our platform engineers work alongside your internal engineers from day one, making architectural decisions together and documenting rationale in Architecture Decision Records committed to your repositories. Platform runbooks, incident response playbooks, and operational guides are authored collaboratively and stored in TechDocs within Backstage so they are version-controlled and discoverable by the entire engineering organisation. We conduct structured knowledge transfer sessions covering platform architecture, operational procedures, and extension patterns before rolling off, and offer a retained support option for the first three months post-engagement to handle questions and review changes to the platform.
Industries
Financial ServicesInsuranceHealthcareRetailTechnology and SaaS