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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Build Assurance Engineer

💰 $95,000 - $160,000

EngineeringQualityDevOpsBuild

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking a Build Assurance Engineer to own the reliability, security and performance of software build and release systems. This role focuses on CI/CD pipeline design and optimization, artifact lifecycle management, build reproducibility and policy enforcement across multiple teams and product lines. The Build Assurance Engineer partners with development, QA, security, and platform teams to automate validation gates, reduce build and release failures, and accelerate safe delivery to production.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Build/Release Engineer with 2–4 years of experience in CI/CD and artifact management
  • DevOps Engineer, CI/CD Specialist, or Release Coordinator transitioning to specialization
  • Software QA/Automation Engineer who has owned test pipeline automation and release validation

Advancement To:

  • Senior Build Assurance Engineer / Principal Release Engineer
  • Release & Delivery Manager or Head of Release Engineering
  • Director of DevOps, Platform Engineering, or DevSecOps

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer / CI/CD Architect
  • Security Automation Engineer (DevSecOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines to ensure fast, repeatable, and secure software builds and releases across cloud and on-premise environments, prioritizing reliability, traceability and auditability.
  • Own build orchestration and automation using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, TeamCity or similar, including pipeline templates, shared libraries, and reusable pipeline components.
  • Manage artifact lifecycle and repository configuration (Artifactory, Nexus, AWS S3, Azure Artifacts), ensuring correct retention, promotion, signed artifacts, and immutable release artifacts for traceability.
  • Implement and maintain reproducible build practices including deterministic builds, version stamping, dependency pinning, and binary signing to support secure release processes and compliance.
  • Automate build validation and pre-release gates (unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, static analysis, license checks, SCA/vulnerability scanning) to block regressions and security risks before promotion.
  • Integrate Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools into pipelines to surface third-party risk and enable remediation workflows.
  • Build and maintain container image build and hardening pipelines (Docker, OCI images), enforce image provenance, scanning, and vulnerability remediation prior to deployment to registries.
  • Create, maintain and enforce branching, tagging and release strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development, release trains) in partnership with development teams to reduce merge and release friction.
  • Instrument pipelines with metrics (build success rate, mean time to recovery, pipeline run time, queue time, flakiness) and dashboards to monitor health and drive continuous improvements.
  • Troubleshoot build failures, perform root cause analysis, and lead cross-functional resolution with development, infrastructure and QA teams, providing permanent corrective actions and postmortems.
  • Maintain and scale build infrastructure including build agents, runners, container runtimes, caching layers, and ephemeral environments to meet throughput and security requirements.
  • Author and maintain tooling, scripts and utilities (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate repetitive tasks, accelerate onboarding, and standardize build workflows across teams.
  • Define and implement release promotion and rollback processes, including automated canary/blue-green deployment triggers, artifact gating and emergency rollback playbooks.
  • Ensure compliance with security and regulatory controls by integrating secrets management, key/certificate rotation, binary signing, and audit trails into build and release pipelines.
  • Lead vulnerability triage and remediation activities tied to build and release artifacts, coordinating with security teams to prioritize and close findings derived from SCA, SAST and container scans.
  • Collaborate with QA and test automation teams to orchestrate pipeline-level test execution, parallelization, test environment provisioning, and dynamic test data management to reduce lead time.
  • Drive cost optimization of build and CI infrastructure by implementing caching strategies, build artifact compression, on-demand runner provisioning, and efficient cloud resource usage.
  • Implement Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) for provisioning build agents, registries, and artifact stores to enable reproducible and versioned build infrastructure deployments.
  • Enforce configuration management and environment parity across development, staging and production to prevent “works on my machine” issues and ensure release fidelity.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive build and release documentation, runbooks, SLOs and operational playbooks to support 24/7 operations and audit readiness.
  • Mentor and train engineering teams on best practices for build definition, dependency management, semantic versioning, and pipeline hygiene to raise overall organization capability.
  • Drive cross-team governance for standardized CI/CD patterns, pipeline templates, linting rules, and quality gates to reduce duplication and improve maintainability.
  • Participate in release planning, providing build capacity estimates, release windows coordination, and risk assessment for major feature rollouts and maintenance releases.
  • Evaluate and recommend new build, CI/CD and artifact tooling (commercial and open-source) and lead pilot/proof-of-concept implementations to advance the organization’s release capability.
  • Maintain integration with deployment and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Spinnaker) to automate end-to-end release workflows from build to production delivery.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in onboarding new teams onto shared pipeline templates and artifact registries, producing onboarding guides and working sessions.
  • Support scheduled audits and compliance reviews by preparing build artefact provenance and pipeline audit logs.
  • Participate in on-call rotations for build and release incidents and respond to escalations affecting release timelines.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • CI/CD Pipeline Engineering: hands-on experience designing and operating pipelines in Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps with pipeline-as-code and shared libraries.
  • Artifact & Package Management: proficiency with Artifactory, Nexus, Docker Registry, npm/nuget/maven repositories, and artifact lifecycle policies.
  • Build Tools & Languages: experience with Maven, Gradle, Make, CMake, Bazel or equivalent and familiarity with compiled and interpreted language build flows (Java, .NET, C/C++, Go, Node.js, Python).
  • Scripting & Automation: advanced scripting in Python, Bash, PowerShell to build tooling, automation and pipeline helpers.
  • Containerization & Kubernetes: Docker image build best practices, OCI image management and basic Kubernetes/Helm knowledge for integrating build artifacts into deployable images.
  • Source Control & Branching Strategies: deep understanding of Git workflows, branching, tagging, release branches and merge/conflict resolution best practices.
  • Security & Compliance in CI/CD: integrating SCA/SBOM, static analysis, secrets management, binary signing, and policy-as-code into pipelines (e.g., Trivy, Snyk, Anchore, OWASP tools).
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation to provision CI/CD runners, agent pools, and build infrastructure reproducibly.
  • Monitoring & Observability: create and use build/release metrics, logs and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) to measure pipeline reliability and performance.
  • Release Management Tools: experience with release orchestration and promotion tools (ArgoCD, Spinnaker) and automated rollback strategies.
  • Cloud CI and Build Services: experience using cloud CI features and runners (AWS CodeBuild, Azure Pipelines, GHA runners) and optimizing cloud costs.
  • Test Integration: orchestration of automated unit, integration, regression and smoke tests within pipelines and parallel test execution design.

Soft Skills

  • Cross-functional Collaboration: ability to influence and collaborate with engineering, QA, security and product stakeholders to align on build and release goals.
  • Problem Solving & Root Cause Analysis: methodical troubleshooting and documented corrective actions to eliminate recurring pipeline failures.
  • Communication & Documentation: clear written and verbal communication of pipeline designs, runbooks, postmortems and onboarding material.
  • Prioritization & Time Management: manage competing release deadlines, emergency patches and technical debt remediation with clear trade-offs.
  • Mentoring & Training: capability to coach teams and junior engineers on CI/CD best practices, tool adoption and pipeline hygiene.
  • Attention to Detail & Process Orientation: enforce release policies, versioning discipline, and artifact integrity to reduce operational risk.
  • Adaptability & Continuous Learning: quickly evaluate and adopt new CI/CD tools or practices and apply them pragmatically to solve real-world release problems.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline and/or relevant professional certifications (Certified Jenkins Engineer, HashiCorp, CNCF, or cloud provider certifications).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • DevOps / Systems Engineering
  • Information Security / Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of experience in build/release engineering, CI/CD, DevOps or related roles with demonstrable ownership of production pipelines.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive experience managing enterprise-scale CI/CD systems, artifact repositories, container builds and release orchestration.
  • Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments, implementing audit trails, SBOM generation and automated compliance gates.
  • Prior exposure to cloud-native build infrastructure, cost optimization for CI/CD, and implementing SLOs for pipeline reliability.
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