I Got a Platform Engineering Job. Here's What Happened.

After seven years at Veeam, I’m moving on. Starting May 4th I’ll be a Consultant Platform Engineer at Nationwide Insurance, working on their application and database platforms team: production EKS clusters, GitOps, policy enforcement, the whole stack.

The Veeam years

I don’t have anything bad to say about Veeam. I learned a ton there. I worked my way up to Technical Lead on the NA VCSP support team, became the knowledge domain expert for our cloud service provider ecosystem, and spent years deep in the weeds of enterprise backup infrastructure. Seven years on the support side of a product teaches you a lot about how systems actually fail.

But the growth opportunities on my side of the org dried up. The engineering roles I wanted either didn’t exist in my corner of the company or required relocation that didn’t make sense for my family. I’d been building toward cloud-native platform work for a while. Got my CKA, KCNA, KCSA, a handful of Azure certs, Terraform Associate, finished an MS in CS from CU Boulder. At some point I had to admit I was preparing for a job I didn’t have.

The search

Job searching while employed is its own special kind of grind. I was doing it for months.

I tried the internal route first. There was a Platform Engineer role at Veeam’s VDC that looked like a perfect fit until it came with a five-days-a-week San Francisco mandate. That killed it. After that I started looking externally in earnest.

I applied everywhere. Grafana, Abnormal AI, SentiLink, Lenovo, K1X, Braintrust, a handful of others. Some never responded. Some got multiple rounds in and then went quiet. One or two came down to timing or comp. It’s a weird headspace to be in, where you’re performing well at your current job during the day and then spending your evenings prepping for interviews at companies that might ghost you.

Nationwide actually came up twice. The first time was a Specialist role that I turned down because the compensation didn’t make sense for the move. A few weeks later, a different role opened up on their application and database platforms team. Consultant-level platform engineer. I went through the panel, it clicked, and the offer came through. Right role, right team, right time.

What I’m walking into

The team runs the application and database platform layer on AWS. Kubernetes. ArgoCD. OPA Gatekeeper. Cilium. Prometheus. These are tools I’ve been labbing with and studying for the last year-plus, and now I get to run them in production at scale. That’s really it. That’s why I took the job.

I’ve also got a roadmap for the next couple years: finish CKS, knock out CKAD, work toward Kubestronaut, and start contributing to some of the open source projects in the stack. The goal is to build a reputation in this space that goes beyond any single employer.

The short version

Veeam was good to me. The opportunities I wanted just weren’t there anymore. I found something that lines up with where I’ve been heading. I start in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to it.