DevOps Build & Release Engineer — CI/CD Optimizer

Northwood Space; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwood Space is seeking a Developer Experience Engineer to own the build system, CI pipelines, test harness integrations, and developer environments used by FPGA, embedded, DSP, cloud, and ground teams. You will define reusable templates, track build performance, and drive reliability improvements across Northwood’s Platform team.

The role emphasizes cross-disciplinary collaboration, release automation, and measurable productivity improvements to accelerate commits to production while

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/engineering or related field.
• 3+ years of experience in build engineering, DevOps, CI/CD, developer productivity, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience owning CI pipelines for a multi-team codebase.
• Proficiency in Python and shell scripting; ability to read and build Rust or C/C++ projects.
• Solid understanding of containers, Linux, and Git workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and fix slow or unreliable builds, with specific examples.

Responsibilities

• Own the build system: reproducibility, caching, build times, and cross-platform targets spanning cloud services, embedded firmware, and FPGA gateware.
• Design and maintain reusable GitLab CI templates and pipeline components, with fast early checks and reduced flakiness.
• Build reproducible developer environments so new engineers are productive on day one.
• Implement release automation and promotion mechanics from development through staging to production, including artifact signing and supply chain checks.
• Instrument the build and CI system, publish productivity metrics, and use them to prioritize tooling roadmap.
• Support engineers on build and pipeline issues and turn recurring problems into permanent fixes.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Tools

GitLab CI

GitHub Actions

Buildkite

Job description

Northwood Space is seeking a Developer Experience Engineer to own the build system, CI pipelines, test harness integrations, and developer environments used by FPGA, embedded, DSP, cloud, and ground teams. You will define reusable templates, track build performance, and drive reliability improvements across Northwood’s Platform team.

The role emphasizes cross-disciplinary collaboration, release automation, and measurable productivity improvements to accelerate commits to production while