The Rise of the AI Platform Engineer

Site reliability engineering just got a new job description. Harish Gaggar, Staff Software Site Reliability Engineer at Credit Karma, joins Alan Shimel on Techstrong TV to explain how traditional platform engineering is being reshaped by the demands of AI agents, agentic workflows and the strict compliance rules of a regulated fintech. Over 10 years at Credit Karma, Harish has watched the discipline evolve from provisioning GKE clusters to building a paved-path platform where any developer can go from idea to a fully functional AI agent in a single day. He walks through his “build, deploy, operate” methodology — automating GitHub repo creation and boilerplate through internal developer portals, standardizing workload identity and guardrails at deploy time, and wiring in centralized memory, tracing and observability from day one. He also gets candid about the realities of building AI in an air-gapped, regulated environment where SaaS shortcuts aren’t an option, and closes with practical advice for SREs facing the shift.