Build & Release DevOps Lead Engineer
Cupertino, CA, USA (Onsite)
Contract
Note:
We are specifically looking for strong candidates from top product-based organizations, and former Apple consultants/employees will be given high preference.
About the Role
You'll be the day to day owner of build promotion, deployment coordination, and incident triage for a major release. This is fundamentally a coordination and judgment role: you won't be the person writing the code that goes into release, you'll be the person deciding when it's safe to promote, who needs to be in the room when two projects conflict, and whether a live incident gets fixed forward or rolled back. That makes clear, fast, cross team communication the most important skill for this role, more than any specific tech stack.
What You'll Do
- Own the build promotion cadence across distributed capability teams (Demand, Supply, Data pipelines etc), moderating handoffs so promotions don't collide.
- Actively resolve multi project conflicts: when two teams need conflicting code versions or configurations in major releases at the same time, decide and communicate how that gets resolved (time slots, feature flag isolation, sequencing).
- Own the environment during major blockers or outages: drive fast alignment across teams and make the final call on fix forward versus rollback.
- Collaborate with dev teams to define and maintain accountability mapping for every critical R9 service: owner, backup owner, escalation path, and contact point.
- Work with E2E and SRE to define and enforce build promotion criteria, validation requirements, and exception handling for changes entering R9.
- Support rollout of safe deployment practices (canary or blue green) as they're piloted and expanded across R9 services.
- Track and report on major release health KPIs (deployment failure rate, mean time to identify, mean time to fix, P1 SLA compliance) and surface trends to engineering and leadership.
- Partner with capability teams to close configuration, dependency, and feature flag gaps that create recurring instability.
- Monitor the smoke tests and perform initial bug triage using existing tools and involve the right dev partners as needed for resolving the bugs.
What We're Looking For
Required Qualifications:
- Experience in release engineering, build and deployment pipelines, or environment/release management, ideally in a shared, multi team environment.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You'll be coordinating across teams that don't report to you, running incident calls, and writing promotion/rollback criteria that other teams need to follow without ambiguity.
- Comfort making a decision under pressure (fix forward vs. rollback) and owning the outcome, rather than escalating every call.
- Experience with CI/CD concepts, build promotion gates, and rollback or fix forward processes.
- Ability to work independently across ambiguous, cross team problems without a fixed playbook already in place.
- Proficiency in Python and Bash/Shell scripting
- Strong Git workflow expertise (branching, PRs, merge strategies)
- Hands-on Jenkins (or equivalent CI/CD) pipeline experience
- Unix/Linux systems experience and debugging skills
Nice to Have:
- Containerization (Docker) and basic Kubernetes
- Observability tooling (Grafana/PrometheSplunk)Familiarity with canary or blue green deployment strategies.
- Experience with incident management processes (triage, severity levels, escalation paths).
- Background working with or alongside SRE teams on monitoring, alerting, or health checks.
- Exposure to advertising or ad delivery systems is a plus, not required.
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
