I have the option to peruse platform engineering and am wondering if it’s a good career path? Will there be growth over the next 5 to 10 years? Is on call typical? Is it fun or enjoyable? Is the pay in our industry good?
No
Sounds like you are not familiar with software products and how they are built. Most companies have a platform that multiple products are built on top of. You can think of an OS as a platform. At Microsoft there are many platforms. .Net is a platform J2EE, if that still exists was a platform. So to answer your question platforms are great but they kind of suck to work on. You will always be employed but everyone will be yelling at you to support some new platform feature.
This has nothing to do with it Platform Eng is just another name for Sys Eng / Devops / SRE and is about “dev enablement”
What the fuck are you talking about? When does the word platform mean devops. Are you new to the industry?
Sure, it is software engineering. On call is typical. It can be fun although heavy on firefighting. Pay is software engineer pay.