There's no 'one-size-fits-all' when it comes to structuring platform engineering teams — but the structure you choose will absolutely shape your velocity, stability, and developer experience.
There's no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to structuring platform engineering teams — but the structure you choose will absolutely shape your velocity, stability, and developer experience.
Two dominant models are emerging in the wild:
Center of Excellence (CoE)
A centralized team that builds reusable platforms, golden paths, and governance from a central location.
Embedded Teams
Platform engineers placed inside product or feature pods to build platform capabilities closer to the ground.
Center of Excellence: Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Standardization at Scale A CoE can define and enforce consistent patterns, templates, and tooling across the org — crucial for reducing duplication and keeping systems operable long-term. | Slow to Adapt to Product Needs CoEs often operate on a roadmap cadence that doesn't match the urgency of fast-moving product teams. |
| Economies of Expertise Centralized teams can go deep — on Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, internal developer portals, etc. That depth is harder to cultivate in pods. | Perceived as a Bottleneck When CoE is the only way to get infrastructure help, it becomes a blocker — or worse, gets bypassed entirely. |
| Better Governance and Security Policies like zero-trust networking, least privilege access, and audit trails are easier to enforce when platform is centralized. | Detached from Developer Reality CoEs can over-optimize for theoretical reuse instead of building what teams actually need. "The golden path" gathers dust. |
| Clear Ownership One team owns the platform. No ambiguity about who maintains what. |
Embedded in Pods: Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Tighter Product Alignment Embedded engineers understand the nuances of each team's workloads — and can ship infra tailored to those needs. | Inconsistency Across Teams You risk infra sprawl and drift — each pod building their own snowflake deployment pipeline or secrets manager. |
| Faster Feedback Loops Bugs, friction, and tooling gaps surface instantly. Fixes happen faster. | Reinvention of the Wheel Without coordination, different pods may solve the same problem five times over. |
| Better Trust and Adoption Engineers are more likely to use and trust tools built by someone sitting next to them (figuratively or literally). | Burnout Risk Embedded engineers may become a lone DevOps shoulder to cry on — expected to support, maintain, and build all at once. |
| Natural Champions for DX Embedded platform engineers act as internal advocates for platform adoption and pain point reduction. | Harder to Scale Shared Practices Innovation stays local. Golden patterns get lost in tribal knowledge. |
So... Which One is Better?
Wrong question.
The right structure depends on your stage, scale, and strategic priorities:
Early-Stage or Infra-Light Teams
Benefit more from embedded platform engineers, since speed and empathy matter more than reuse at this stage.
Mid-Size Organizations
May want to pivot to a CoE to unify standards and reduce cognitive load as infrastructure complexity grows.
Large-Scale Organizations
Often hybridize: a central CoE building golden paths, with embedded engineers helping teams adopt them.
It's not a binary choice but a spectrum that often evolves as your organization grows. The right structure depends on your stage, scale, and strategic priorities.
A Final Thought
Regardless of model, what matters most is feedback flow. Platform engineering is not about ivory towers or ticket queues. It's about enabling others to ship faster, safer, and smarter.
Whether you centralize or embed, make sure you're building with your users — not just for them.
Ready to Transform Your Platform Engineering?
StarOps helps you accelerate your platform engineering journey, whether you're running a Center of Excellence or embedded teams:
- Codify best practices into reusable workflows
- Tailor workflows to your team's specific needs
- Ship faster with less hand-holding and fewer fire drills