Domain-driven platform engineering is the future | Weave Intelligence

What if the reason most internal platforms stall isn’t Kubernetes, portals, or tooling - but the fact that they’re built without a domain?

In this episode, Luca sits down with Ajay Chankramath (former Head of Platform Engineering at ThoughtWorks, ex-CTO at Brillio, founder/CEO of Platform Metrics) to unpack Domain-Driven Platform Engineering (DDPE) - and why it becomes even more critical as AI expands the number of “builders” inside the enterprise. They explore how platform teams can move beyond generic infrastructure abstractions and instead translate developer intent into domain-specific capabilities: the language of payments, claims processing, retail fulfillment, compliance, data science, and more.

The conversation connects classic platform practices like golden paths, team topologies, and platform-as-a-product - then fast-forwards into the AI era. Ajay explains why citizen developers and vibe coding won’t replace enterprise engineering, why product managers become more central as building gets democratized, and why the real bottleneck shifts from creation to evaluation, guardrails, and trust. From self-healing platforms to agentic workflows and cloud bots, they outline what it takes to make AI-enabled platforms production-grade without letting non-determinism quietly become risk.

In this episode:

• Why “platform engineering without domain context” is just infrastructure with prettier APIs

• Platform domains vs. business domains: what you build with vs. who you build for

• DDPE in practice: domain-specific golden paths (e.g., “how payments deploy safely”)

• The 3 pillars of DDPE: domain-aligned boundaries, ubiquitous language, bounded context + anti-corruption layers

• Scaling platforms as users explode: app devs → ML/FinOps → citizen devs → agents

• The enterprise gap: why Lovable/Replit-style building doesn’t equal production-grade systems

• A practical rollout: map domains → pilot one → extract patterns → expand

• The future: platforms that anticipate domain intent (and why that’s hard)

• SaaS isn’t dead but integration becomes the real battleground

• Why guardrails and AI evals become the critical enterprise skill

💬 “Platform-as-a-product becomes multiple products for multiple customer segments - each with its own domain dialect.”