Interview Tip
A common platform engineering interview question is: "How do you balance developer velocity with security and compliance?" The Gates vs. Guardrails framing is the correct answer structure. Describe how you shift compliance left by embedding automated policy checks into CI/CD pipelines (guardrails), reserving human approval gates only for high-blast-radius or regulatory-mandated changes. Bonus points for naming specific tools: Open Policy Agent (OPA), Checkov, Conftest, or cloud-native tools like AWS Config Rules or Azure Policy.