From scrappy sysadmins and early SRE teams to DevOps and today’s platform engineering wave, this talk traces how operations have evolved—and why the next frontier is treating your platform as a real internal product for developers. This talk will unpack what a modern platform actually is (and isn’t), show how ideas like Team Topologies, golden paths, and “glue as a service” fit together, and share concrete strategies for success: adopting a product mindset, obsessing over developer experience, measuring with DevEx/DORA-style signals, and ruthlessly stripping away incidental complexity so autonomous teams can move faster with less coordination. You’ll leave with a practical mental model and a set of patterns you can apply immediately to build a better loop between developers, platform, and the business.

Director of Engineering - Ziprecruiter

Arthur Freyman is Director of Engineering at ZipRecruiter, where he leads the Core infrastructure and platform organization, focusing on cloud-native