Build Engineer | Torchora

🎯 Role Definition

As a Build Engineer you will own the design, implementation, and operation of the software build and release infrastructure. You will be the subject-matter expert for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, artifact repositories, build tooling, and cross-platform build reproducibility. This role partners closely with development, QA, security, and release teams to automate builds, accelerate delivery, minimize build and integration failures, and enforce best practices for packaging, versioning, and promotion of artifacts through environments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Build Engineer / Release Engineer with hands-on CI/CD experience.
DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer with pipeline and automation focus.
Software Engineer with build-system ownership or packaging experience.

Advancement To:

Senior Build Engineer / Release Manager responsible for multi-product release strategy.
Build & Release Architect designing enterprise-wide CI/CD platforms.
Engineering Manager for Release/Platform teams or Head of Release Engineering.

Lateral Moves:

DevOps Engineer focusing on infrastructure-as-code and deployments.
Site Reliability Engineer focused on production reliability and observability.
Security/Compliance Engineer specializing in supply chain and build security.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, implement and maintain scalable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, or GitHub Actions to enable fast, reliable builds and automated releases.
Own and optimize multi-platform build systems (Linux, Windows, macOS) using build tools like Maven, Gradle, Bazel, CMake, Make, or custom build orchestration to ensure reproducible artifacts and cross-platform parity.
Implement and manage artifact repositories (Artifactory, Nexus) and versioned promotion workflows to secure, store, and distribute build outputs across development, staging, and production environments.
Troubleshoot and resolve build failures, flaky tests, dependency conflicts, and packaging issues by performing root cause analysis, creating permanent fixes, and communicating resolution plans to development teams.
Automate end-to-end release processes including packaging, signing, release notes generation, deployment orchestration, and rollback procedures to reduce manual intervention and deployment risk.
Develop and maintain build automation scripts and tooling using Python, Bash, PowerShell, Ruby, or Groovy to streamline build steps, environment provisioning, and post-build actions.
Integrate static analysis, security scanning (SCA/SAST/DAST), license checks, and vulnerability gates into CI pipelines to enforce quality and compliance before artifacts are promoted.
Implement build caching, distributed build workers, and incremental build strategies to improve pipeline throughput, reduce build times, and optimize resource utilization across CI runners and agents.
Maintain and scale build infrastructure (agents, runners, build pools) using containerization (Docker) and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes) to meet fluctuating CI workload demand.
Configure Git workflows, branching strategies, and CI triggers (PR builds, nightly builds, release branches) that align with team development practices and release cadence.
Create and maintain observability for build systems using logs, metrics, and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK) to monitor build health, queue times, failure rates, and infrastructure costs.
Define and implement artifact signing, checksum verification, and provenance tracking to improve supply chain integrity and support audit and compliance requirements.
Collaborate with product and QA teams to design test orchestration inside CI pipelines, including unit, integration, end-to-end, and performance tests, ensuring pipelines are reliable and fast feedback loops exist.
Build and maintain internal developer tooling and developer experience improvements such as one-command builds, local emulation scripts, and presubmit checks to reduce onboarding friction and developer context switching.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives: perform CI/CD retrospectives, propose architectural changes, optimize pipelines, and reduce mean time to remediation for build-related incidents.
Manage credentials, secrets, and access control for build systems and artifact stores with secure vaulting solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault) and role-based access policies.
Plan and execute migration of legacy build systems and pipelines to modern CI/CD platforms, including risk analysis, rollback plans, and validation to ensure minimal disruption.
Create and maintain comprehensive runbooks, onboarding documentation, build matrices, and troubleshooting guides that help engineers self-serve common build tasks and reduce dependency on the build team.
Coordinate and lead cross-team release readiness activities, readiness checklists, and cutover procedures for major releases, including scheduling, communication, and stakeholder alignment.
Monitor and manage CI infrastructure cost, capacity planning, and provisioning strategy (cloud vs. on-prem agents) to balance performance, reliability, and budget constraints.
Evaluate and pilot new build tools, testing frameworks, and release automation technologies, presenting ROI and migration plans to engineering leadership for adoption.
Enforce and evangelize best practices for dependency management, semantic versioning, artifact naming conventions, and immutable releases to reduce integration surprises and support rollback.
Participate in on-call rotations for CI/CD infrastructure and lead incident response for build and release outages, ensuring timely communication, mitigation, and post-incident reviews.
Collaborate with security and legal teams to implement supply-chain protections such as reproducible builds, SBOM generation, and secure artifact distribution to meet regulatory and enterprise security requirements.

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.
Mentor junior build and release engineers, conduct knowledge-sharing sessions, and maintain a culture of continuous learning around build and release practices.
Assist in procurement and vendor evaluation for CI/CD tools, artifact repositories, and build infrastructure providers.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

CI/CD platforms: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Bamboo — designing, administering and optimizing pipelines.
Build tools and systems: Maven, Gradle, Bazel, CMake, Make, Ant — deep experience configuring, troubleshooting, and optimizing builds.
Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, PowerShell, Groovy — automating build steps, release tasks, and custom integrations.
Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes for CI runners, build sandboxes, and artifactized build environments.
Artifact management: JFrog Artifactory, Sonatype Nexus, and repository design for snapshots, releases, and metadata.
Version control systems & workflows: Git, branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based), pull request CI, and commit signing.
Security & compliance in CI: SCA/SAST tools, artifact signing, SBOM generation, secrets management (Vault, KMS).
Build acceleration & caching: Remote cache configuration for Bazel/Gradle, distributed build workers, and incremental builds.
Observability & monitoring: Logging, metrics, dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) for CI health and build diagnostics.
Release engineering: Packaging, deb/rpm/installer creation, code signing, release note automation, rollback strategies.
Cloud and infrastructure: AWS/GCP/Azure for build agents, storage, and scalable CI infrastructure; IaC with Terraform or CloudFormation.
Debugging & root cause analysis: Diagnosing flakey builds, dependency trees, and intermittent CI failures under time constraints.

Soft Skills

Excellent cross-team communication: explain technical root causes to non-technical stakeholders and coordinate release activities across multiple groups.
Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting mindset with attention to reproducibility and durable fixes.
Proactive ownership and accountability for platform stability, SLA adherence, and continuous service improvement.
Collaboration and mentorship: ability to onboard engineers to CI best practices and run collaborative post-incident reviews.
Time management and prioritization: balance feature work, firefighting, and technical debt related to build systems.
Adaptability and learning orientation: evaluate new CI/CD tools and patterns and advocate for pragmatic adoption.
Customer-focused mindset: treat engineering teams as customers and design tools to reduce cognitive load and increase throughput.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Certifications in DevOps, CI/CD, cloud provider certifications (AWS/GCP/Azure) preferred.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / DevOps Engineering
Electrical Engineering (for systems-level build expertise)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 8+ years of experience in build, release engineering, or DevOps roles.

Preferred:

5+ years experience designing and operating enterprise CI/CD pipelines and build systems.
Demonstrated history of reducing build times, improving pipeline reliability, and migrating legacy build systems to modern CI platforms.
Experience in multi-platform build environments, release orchestration for distributed systems, and hands-on troubleshooting of complex dependency and packaging issues.