Title: Build and Release Engineer
Quick Summary
Northstar Buildworks is hiring a Build and Release Engineer to own the end-to-end software delivery pipeline and enable safe, frequent releases across multiple services. The role blends systems engineering with release management, supply-chain security, and developer experience. We welcome motivated entry-level candidates with strong fundamentals and a passion for automation, while encouraging experienced engineers to lead design reviews, mentor peers, and drive measurable improvements to throughput and reliability.
Project Category or Industry
Software infrastructure for high-growth SaaS and data platforms serving fintech, healthcare, and enterprise productivity
Type
Full-time employment
Experience Level
Entry to mid-level. Graduates and career changers with solid programming or scripting skills and a track record of personal projects are encouraged to apply. Experienced engineers will shape standards, guide peers, and champion best practices.
Duration
Permanent role
Location
Remote-first across the Americas and EMEA with at least four hours of overlap between 09:00 and 18:00 UTC. Optional hybrid collaboration hubs are available in Austin and Lisbon.
Salary
USD 110,000–160,000 base depending on location and experience, plus annual bonus potential, equity participation, comprehensive health coverage, retirement contributions, learning stipend, and paid parental leave.
Payment Mode
Monthly payroll via bank transfer. Contractor arrangements are possible in regions where direct employment is not supported.
Hiring Company Name
Northstar Buildworks
Required Skills or Tools
Candidates should demonstrate strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, and build systems, with practical experience in modern delivery pipelines. Proficiency with at least one pipeline platform such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI, along with artifact management, containerization, and infrastructure as code, is expected. Clear documentation, careful change control, and a security-first mindset are essential.
Project Details
Project Description
This role builds and operates the delivery backbone that product teams rely on. You will design opinionated golden paths for building, testing, signing, and rolling out services, with secure defaults and excellent observability. The purpose is to reduce lead time for changes while improving change success rate and release predictability, enabling teams to ship confidently without manual heroics.
Core Responsibilities and Expected Deliverables
Design, implement, and maintain standardized pipelines from commit to production, including automated quality gates, test orchestration, artifact promotion, and progressive rollout.
Establish reproducible builds with cache strategy, parallelization, and deterministic outputs; manage artifact repositories and dependency proxies with clear retention policies.
Improve release management through versioning conventions, tagged releases, automated notes, and auditable change logs; coordinate cutovers and rollback plans.
Embed supply-chain security by generating software bills of materials, signing artifacts, enforcing policy checks, and publishing attestations.
Provide actionable observability for build and release workflows with dashboards, alerts, and meaningful service level objectives; lead post-incident reviews and drive remediation.
Document golden templates and runbooks; partner with application teams to migrate services to paved paths and retire brittle bespoke scripts.
Required Experience and Preferred Qualifications
We value demonstrable impact more than years of service. Experience that stands out includes migrating legacy jobs to a standardized pipeline, introducing canary or blue-green strategies, cutting build time through efficient caching, and implementing code-signing or policy enforcement. Familiarity with change advisory processes, on-call participation, and cost optimization is a plus. Certifications are welcome, yet portfolio evidence and clarity of reasoning matter most.
Tools or Platforms to Be Used
Pipeline and orchestration: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI; reusable workflows and shared libraries
Build systems: Bazel, Gradle, Maven, or npm with workspace strategies and artifact caching
Containers and runtime: Docker and Kubernetes, with golden base images and image scanning
Infrastructure as code: Terraform and Helm, delivered through a Git-driven workflow
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs, and traces
Security and identity: secret management, artifact signing with modern tooling, and policy as code for guardrails
Language Requirement
English is required for daily collaboration. Additional languages are helpful for cross-region work but not mandatory.
Communication Style
Asynchronous-first using Slack and Git, with weekly Zoom standups, design reviews, and release readiness checks. Architecture decisions are captured in concise decision records with diagrams, success metrics, and rollback procedures.
Time Commitment or Working Window
Approximately forty hours per week with flexible scheduling. A compensated, lightweight release-support rotation is shared across the team for critical windows and planned cutovers.
Payment Terms
Monthly salary with annual performance review and bonus eligibility. Contractor engagements use milestone-based deliverables with biweekly invoicing on net-fifteen terms.
Evaluation Criteria
Practical exercise to create a small service with a fully automated pipeline, artifact promotion, and safe rollout
Portfolio or repository review emphasizing readability, reliability, and security hygiene
Live troubleshooting session using pipeline logs, metrics, and traces to resolve a simulated failure
References confirming calm incident handling, ownership, and communication clarity
Other Requirements
A standard non-disclosure agreement is required upon acceptance, along with identity verification and references consistent with local law. Because this role touches production delivery, security and privacy training is completed during onboarding. Light-touch time tracking applies for contractor roles to support accurate billing and audits.
About the Company
Northstar Buildworks is an engineering firm focused on dependable delivery systems for modern product teams. Since 2017, we have helped SaaS companies and data platforms shorten release cycles, raise quality, and reduce deployment risk by combining strong infrastructure fundamentals with thoughtful developer experience. The team is distributed across North America and Europe with collaboration hubs in Austin and Lisbon. Learn more at https://northstarbuildworks.com or contact careers@northstarbuildworks.com.