Platform Engineering - CI/CD Glossary Definition
Platform engineering builds the paved paths (CI pipelines, runners, deploy tooling) that let product teams ship without reinventing infrastructure each time.
Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating internal self-service tooling (build pipelines, runners, deploy paths) so application teams ship without owning the underlying infrastructure.
The term rose to prominence as an answer to the operational sprawl that pure "you build it, you run it" DevOps created. Instead of every team maintaining its own bespoke pipelines and runner fleets, a platform team packages those capabilities into a reusable product.
In CI
A platform team typically owns the shared GitHub Actions workflows, runner pools, and caching strategy so individual repos consume a uses: reference instead of copy-pasting YAML.