The engineer gets a ticket: "Production is down." They fix it and move on. The DevOps engineer gets the same ticket and asks: "How do we stop this happening again?" They build alerting, write runbooks, and automate the recovery. The platform engineer never sees the ticket. They designed a self-healing pattern six months ago that made the failure mode impossible. This isn't a story about DevOps dying - it's about DevOps growing up. Through the lens of a typical day's work, we'll trace the evolution from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention to strategic design. Drawing on experience leading platform engineering at a fintech running multi-cloud infrastructure, we'll explore what actually changes as organisations mature: not the tools, but the questions we ask and where we invest our time. You'll leave with a framework for recognising where your team sits on this journey, and practical steps to shift from fixing problems to designing them out of existence.

Rui is a Lead Platform Engineer at IG Group, where he leads a distributed platform engineering team across the UK , India and Poland. He works across AWS and GCP but is specialised in GCP. He spends his days building self-service infrastructure, and trying to mass-produce the kind of calm mornings that only come from good platform design.