Build and Release Engineer

Role Overview

We are seeking a Build and Release Engineer with strong hands-on experience in Azure DevOps, source control administration, YAML-based CI/CD pipelines, cross-platform build agents, and artifact management. The ideal candidate will design and maintain secure, reusable, and reliable build and release pipelines, troubleshoot complex build failures, and support end-to-end software delivery across development, testing, staging, and production environments.

Mandatory Certification: Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert, including successful completion of AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions and the applicable prerequisite certification.

Required Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, and Azure Artifacts, with working knowledge of Azure Boards.
• Ability to create and troubleshoot multi-stage YAML pipelines from scratch.
• Experience administering Azure Repos permissions, branch policies, pull request rules, and merge strategies.
• Experience designing and consuming reusable YAML templates across multiple repositories.
• Hands-on experience configuring and maintaining self-hosted build agents on Windows and Linux, including agent pools, toolchains, permissions, and troubleshooting.
• Strong Git knowledge, including branching, merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, tagging, conflict resolution, and history recovery.
• Proficiency in PowerShell and/or Bash for build and deployment automation.
• Practical experience with at least one major build ecosystem: .NET/MSBuild, npm/Node.js, Maven/Gradle, or Python packaging.
• Understanding of the end-to-end software build and release lifecycle, artifact versioning, environment promotion, deployment validation, and rollback.
• Ability to diagnose failures involving application code, pipeline configuration, dependencies, operating systems, and infrastructure.
• Mandatory: Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert certification, including AZ-400 and the applicable prerequisite certification.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Docker-based builds and container registries such as Azure Container Registry.
• Experience with workload identity federation and managed identities for secure pipeline authentication.
• Hands-on experience integrating SonarQube with Azure Pipelines and Azure Repos pull requests, including automated code analysis, pull request decoration, and quality gate enforcement through required status checks and branch policies.
• Experience supporting macOS build agents, where required.
• Experience maintaining classic Azure DevOps release pipelines and migrating them to multi-stage YAML pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

Azure Repos Administration and Source Control

• Administer Azure Repos repositories, repository permissions, branch security, and access controls.
• Define and maintain branching strategies, repository standards, and pull request workflows.
• Configure branch policies, including minimum reviewer requirements, automatically included reviewers, pull request build validation, required status checks, comment resolution, and linked work item requirements.
• Manage permitted merge strategies, restrictions on direct pushes, and controlled permissions to bypass policies.
• Manage pull request completion practices, including squash merges, merge commits, and rebase-based workflows.
• Resolve complex merge conflicts and troubleshoot Git history, tagging, and repository issues.
• Establish commit, tagging, and versioning standards and manage large files and repository maintenance where needed.

Azure Pipelines and Reusable Templates

• Design, create, and maintain YAML-based CI/CD pipelines from scratch.
• Implement multi-stage pipelines covering build, test, package, publish, and deployment activities.
• Design and maintain reusable stage, job, and step templates across repositories.
• Configure template parameters, variables, variable groups, conditions, dependencies, and output variables.
• Manage shared template repositories, template versioning, and controlled rollout of template changes.
• Configure CI triggers, branch and path filters, scheduled runs, pipeline resource triggers, and pull request build validation policies.
• Secure pipeline access to repositories, service connections, variable groups, and other protected resources.

Cross-Platform Build Agents

• Configure and administer Microsoft-hosted and self-hosted build agents and agent pools.
• Install, register, configure, and maintain self-hosted agents on Windows and Linux, with macOS support where required.
• Provision and maintain SDKs, compilers, package managers, build tools, and other agent dependencies.
• Configure agent capabilities and demands, service accounts, permissions, and network access.
• Troubleshoot agent availability, toolchain incompatibilities, workspace contamination, connectivity, and platform-specific build failures.
• Maintain consistent build environments and appropriate workload isolation.

Build Automation and Artifact Management

• Automate source checkout, dependency restoration, compilation, unit testing, static analysis, code coverage, packaging, and artifact publication.
• Support application build ecosystems such as .NET/MSBuild, npm/Node.js, Maven/Gradle, and Python.
• Configure and administer Azure Artifacts feeds, package permissions, upstream sources, retention, and package versioning.
• Manage pipeline artifacts and package feeds according to their intended purposes.
• Improve build performance through caching, parallel execution, incremental builds, and agent optimization.
• Diagnose failed builds, flaky tests, dependency issues, and differences between developer and CI environments.

Release and Deployment Management

• Build and maintain deployment stages using Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps Environments.
• Configure approvals, checks, deployment conditions, and environment-specific settings.
• Promote the same versioned artifacts across development, test, staging, and production environments rather than rebuilding for each environment.
• Collaborate with application and platform teams on deployment validation, rollback procedures, and release troubleshooting.
• Maintain release documentation and traceability across source commits, builds, artifacts, and deployments.

Security, Traceability, and Continuous Improvement

• Apply least-privilege access controls to repositories, pipelines, agent pools, feeds, service connections, and environments.
• Protect secrets and use approved authentication methods, including workload identity federation and managed identities where supported.
• Use Azure Boards work item links to maintain traceability from requirements and changes through pull requests, builds, and releases.
• Monitor build success rates, execution times, queue times, and recurring failures, and implement measurable improvements.
• Document engineering standards and guide developers on Git workflows, pull requests, pipeline templates, and build troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with development, QA, platform, and release teams to deliver reliable, repeatable, secure, and traceable software releases.

Education Requirement

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field is preferred.