Onboarding Guide: Your First Week on the Platform Team

Team: Platform Engineering at Brightwave (fictional company, brightwave.example) For: New backend and infrastructure engineers Updated: 22 October 2026

Welcome to the Platform team. This guide covers what to set up, who to meet and what you should have done by the end of week one. Nobody expects you to ship a big change in your first week. We do expect you to ship a small one.

Day 1: Access and setup

Work through this list with your onboarding buddy:

Laptop set up and signed in to SSO.
Access to GitHub org, the on-call tool, the cloud console (read-only) and the team chat channels #platform and #platform-alerts.
Clone the platform monorepo and run make bootstrap. It installs the toolchain versions pinned in .tool-versions.
Run make test and confirm it passes. If it does not, that is your first bug. Tell your buddy.

Day 2: Understand the system

Read these in order. Each takes about 30 minutes.

Doc	Why it matters
`docs/architecture.md`	The map of services and how traffic flows
`docs/deploys.md`	How code reaches production and how to roll back
`docs/oncall.md`	What a page looks like and who handles what
Last 3 incident reviews	The fastest way to learn where the system is fragile

Then sit in on the daily standup at 10:00 and the weekly architecture review on Tuesday.

Day 3: Your starter task

Your buddy will assign an issue labelled good-first-task. These are small, real changes, such as adding a missing metric, fixing a flaky test or improving an error message. Aim to open a pull request by the end of the day.

How we review:

Every PR needs one approval from the team.
Keep PRs under 300 lines where you can.
Describe what changed, why, and how you tested it.

Day 4: Deploy it

Merge your PR and follow it through the pipeline: build, staging, canary, production. Watch the dashboard for your service during the canary step. This is the same path every change takes, so it is worth seeing once with someone beside you.

Day 5: Shadow on-call

Spend the day with the current on-call engineer. You will not carry the pager for your first month. You will learn:

How alerts are triaged
Where the runbooks live
When to escalate and to whom

People to meet in week one

Your manager: goals for your first 30, 60 and 90 days.
Your buddy: your first stop for any question, however small.
Data team liaison: most platform changes touch their pipelines.
Security partner: how we handle secrets and access reviews.

End of week checklist

All accounts working
Local environment runs and tests pass
Read the four core docs
One PR merged and deployed to production
One on-call shadow day done
30-day goals agreed with your manager

Where to ask questions

Post in #platform first. There are no silly questions in your first month, and the answer usually helps the next new person too. If something in this guide is wrong or out of date, fix it in a PR. That counts as a contribution.