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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Build Assurance Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringQuality AssuranceBuild EngineeringDevOpsEmbedded Systems

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Build Assurance Engineer is the technical owner and strategic leader for the software and embedded build lifecycle. This role leads design, implementation, and continuous improvement of reproducible build pipelines, release verification, artifact management, and automated gating across multi-platform products (embedded Linux, RTOS, cloud services). The Lead Build Assurance Engineer partners with software, QA, hardware, security and release teams to ensure repeatable, auditable and secure builds — enabling predictable, high-quality releases at scale.

Key SEO / LLM keywords: Lead Build Assurance Engineer, build validation, CI/CD pipelines, release engineering, reproducible builds, configuration management, embedded toolchains, artifact repositories, automated gating, build automation.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Build/Release Engineer
  • Senior DevOps or Release Automation Engineer
  • Principal Software/Embedded Engineer with build/release ownership

Advancement To:

  • Director of Release Engineering
  • Head of Platform Engineering
  • VP of DevOps / VP of Engineering (Infrastructure & Tooling)

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • Platform Engineering Lead
  • Security/Compliance Engineering Lead (Supply Chain Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own the end-to-end build assurance strategy across multiple product lines: design and operate reproducible, auditable build pipelines that deliver deterministic artifacts for embedded, desktop and cloud targets while meeting release cadence and quality targets.
  • Lead architecture, implementation and continuous improvement of CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or equivalent to automate build, test, sign and publish steps for software and firmware.
  • Design, maintain and harden cross-compilation toolchains, Yocto/OpenEmbedded layers, BitBake recipes, or other embedded build systems to ensure consistent binary outputs across developer workstations, build farms, and CI agents.
  • Author and maintain build validation gates and automated quality checks (unit, integration, static analysis, code style, license compliance) to prevent regressions and enforce release standards prior to artifact promotion.
  • Implement artifact management and promotion workflows using Nexus, Artifactory or other repositories; manage semantic versioning, metadata, provenance and retention policies to support traceability and rollbacks.
  • Lead configuration management and branching strategy; define Git workflows, merge gating, release branching, and tagging policies that minimize merge conflicts and reduce integration risk.
  • Champion and implement supply-chain security practices: secure build hosts, reproducible builds, SBOM generation, signing and verification, and integration with vulnerability scanning tools and SLSA/attestation frameworks.
  • Drive automation of the build farm infrastructure (bare metal, VMs, containers or cloud-based runners), including orchestration (Kubernetes), auto-scaling, monitoring and cost optimization to ensure stable, performant builds.
  • Own root-cause analysis for build failures, flaky tests and non-reproducible artifacts; lead cross-functional post-mortems and corrective actions to permanently eliminate systemic issues.
  • Define and track build-time and reliability KPIs (build success rate, mean time to repair, average build duration, artifact reproducibility rate) and report to engineering leadership with actionable insights and forecasts.
  • Implement and maintain reproducible environment definitions (Dockerfiles, Nix/Guix, virtualization, immutable images) so developers and CI share identical build environments and dependency behavior.
  • Collaborate with test engineering to integrate hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), device labs and automated integration test farms into the release pipeline and ensure build-to-hardware traceability.
  • Lead release orchestration for major milestones: coordinate cross-team code freeze, release candidate validation, sign-off, and production deployment steps with clear runbooks and rollback procedures.
  • Manage third-party toolchains and dependency updates (compilers, SDKs, libraries) including compatibility validation, regression testing, and phased rollout strategies to minimize downstream impact.
  • Drive standardization of build metadata, artifact provenance and traceability across microservices, libraries and firmware images to enable faster incident response and compliance audits.
  • Develop and enforce backup, high-availability and disaster recovery plans for critical build infrastructure and artifact repositories to avoid single points of failure during release windows.
  • Maintain and extend test harnesses for automated build-time tests including smoke tests, regression suites, integration tests and binary size/performance checks within the CI pipeline.
  • Provide hands-on mentorship and technical leadership to build engineers: conduct code and pipeline reviews, pair on complex CI jobs, and grow team competence in build systems and automation best practices.
  • Manage vendor and open-source tool evaluations, oversee procurement and license compliance, and own relationships with third-party build tooling providers where applicable.
  • Drive cross-team alignment on release readiness criteria, SLAs, and maintenance windows while balancing developer velocity with production stability and customer commitments.
  • Author and maintain comprehensive build and release documentation: runbooks, build environment onboarding guides, escalation procedures, and developer-facing pipeline descriptions to reduce knowledge silos.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives that reduce build times, increase parallelization, cache efficiency, and leverage incremental build techniques to speed developer feedback loops.
  • Partner with Security and Compliance teams to prepare for audits (ISO 9001, ISO 26262, IEC 61508, SOC2) by providing build records, CI logs, SBOMs and evidence of secure build controls and traceability.
  • Coordinate and participate in cross-functional code freeze, cherry-pick and hotfix procedures for crisis management and emergency releases, ensuring safety and minimal service disruption.
  • Evaluate and integrate observability, telemetry and centralized logging across CI/CD systems and build runners to improve failure diagnosis and operational visibility.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expertise designing and operating CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or comparable systems; deep familiarity with pipeline-as-code.
  • Strong experience with build systems and build tools: Bazel, Gradle, Maven, CMake, Make, or equivalent; ability to optimize and parallelize builds.
  • Proven hands-on knowledge of embedded build ecosystems: Yocto/OpenEmbedded, BitBake, Buildroot, cross-compilation toolchains (GCC/Clang), and managing BSPs.
  • Proficiency with Git and branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development), merge gating, PR policies, and release tagging best practices.
  • Experience with artifact repositories and package managers: Nexus, Artifactory, npm, pip, Maven Central, Docker Registry; managing snapshots, releases and retention.
  • Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or other scripting languages for pipeline orchestration, tooling and automation.
  • Containerization and virtualization expertise: Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, and immutable image workflows for reproducible build environments.
  • Familiarity with static analysis and quality tooling: SonarQube, Coverity, clang-tidy, ESLint, and integrating these tools into CI gates.
  • Knowledge of software supply chain security: SBOMs, signing (GPG/code signing), vulnerability scanning (Snyk, Trivy), artifact attestation and SLSA principles.
  • Experience with monitoring and observability for CI systems: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, and alerting for build infrastructure health.
  • Exposure to cloud CI/infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) including build runner provisioning, S3/Blob storage for artifacts and cost control strategies.
  • Ability to design test harness integration: automated unit, integration, HIL test orchestration and linking test results to build artifacts.
  • Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code: Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation for provisioning CI/build resources.
  • Familiarity with compliance, safety or regulatory standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508, SOC2) as they relate to traceability and build reproducibility.
  • Experience with performance tuning and optimization of build systems, caching strategies (ccache, remote caches), and networked build farms.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership with hands-on technical credibility; able to guide teams, prioritize, and make pragmatic tradeoffs under deadline pressure.
  • Excellent cross-functional communication and stakeholder management skills; able to translate technical risk to business impact.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset with experience leading root-cause investigations and driving lasting fixes.
  • Mentoring and coaching ability to grow junior and mid-level engineers in build engineering practices and tooling.
  • Documentation discipline and ability to produce clear runbooks, onboarding guides, and operational documentation.
  • Project and release orchestration skills with proven experience coordinating complex, multi-team releases.
  • Adaptability and continuous improvement mindset; proactive about identifying automation opportunities and reducing manual toil.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills when balancing speed vs. stability across competing priorities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Systems Engineering preferred but not required.
  • Certifications in DevOps, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), or security (e.g., CISSP, CISM) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical / Computer Engineering
  • Embedded Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–12+ years total engineering experience with at least 3–5 years leading build/release engineering or CI/CD initiatives.

Preferred:

  • Prior experience as a lead or principal engineer owning build/release for embedded or large-scale distributed systems.
  • Demonstrated track record of implementing secure, reproducible build pipelines and improving release reliability for production products.
  • Experience working in regulated industries (automotive, aerospace, medical devices, telecommunications) is highly desirable.
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