If you've been in DevOps long enough, you've probably seen the job postings by now. "Platform Engineer." "Internal Developer Platform." "Platform-as-a-Product." The titles are everywhere. Gartner says 80% of large engineering organizations will have dedicated platform teams by 2026. That's up from 45% in 2022. But nobody really explains what changes. Not the buzzwords. The actual day job. The skills. The salary. The headaches. I work as a DevOps Engineer at a company that builds Kubernetes application platforms. So I'm living in the middle of this transition every single day. Let me break down what's actually happening, what it means for your career, and whether you should care. What's Actually Happening Here's the short version: DevOps broke at scale. Not the philosophy. The practice. When you have 5 teams and 20 services, DevOps works beautifully. Everyone knows everyone. You can walk over to someone's desk (or Slack them) and figure out why the pipeline broke.…