Sam Barlien
I help teams with platform engineering and agentic engineering platforms.
I'm Head of Ecosystem at the world's largest platform engineering community, where I write research on best practices, drawing on data and conversations with hundreds of platform engineering teams and leaders a year. I also help run Platform Weekly, co-host PlatformCon, and lead the community Ambassador programme.
I'm also an actor and filmmaker in my spare time. Highlights include appearing in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Chevalier, and my own self-funded horror film, Embug, which is currently in post-production.
Research
01 State of AI in Platform Engineering 2026 38% of organisations now ship twice as much since AI, but only 8% see a real return. Our data says the bottleneck is the platform, not the model. 02 Platform engineering 2.0: An evolution for the AI era Platform engineering for AI is an evolution, not a revolution. The Internal Developer Platform becomes an Agentic Engineering Platform (AEP) on the same operating model, and I set out the five pillars to get there. 03 State of Platform Engineering Report: Volume 4 We surveyed 500+ platform engineers and leaders. Platform engineering has become the operating model for AI-native companies, and is spreading into security, observability and FinOps.On stage and on air
Panel AI Didn't Remove the Bottleneck. It Moved It Speaker, Coder panel recorded at Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara (published on Platform Engineering YouTube)
Podcast Why Your Platform Engineering Is Failing (And How to Fix It) - Tech Lead Journal #247 Guest, Tech Lead Journal
Panel Why AI Fails Without a Platform Moderator, Platform Engineering Meetup, San Francisco (with CircleCI)