Staff Engineer - Releases

Position Overview

This role is with a partner company operating out of Australia, seeking a Staff Engineer specializing in Releases. The position focuses on guiding the foundational platform responsible for overseeing release controls, utilized by top engineering teams to deploy software securely and efficiently. It combines hands-on development with architectural strategy and cross-team leadership, addressing complex challenges in distributed systems, security, reliability, scalability, and developer experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of the release platform’s technical architecture, defining the core release models and relationships among services, commits, artifacts, environments, and users.
• Lead important design choices around security, scalability, reliability, immutable audit trails, policy enforcement, and governance of releases.
• Implement integrations with CI/CD pipelines, source control systems, and deployment platforms, including handling data ingestion from these systems.
• Engineer support for progressive delivery techniques such as canary releases, blue/green deployments, staged rollouts, health-based promotions, and automated rollback mechanisms.
• Develop and enhance tooling and systems that accommodate large engineering teams' software delivery operations.
• Troubleshoot and optimize infrastructure, backend services, and data stores to meet performance and scalability requirements.
• Collaborate directly with customers and stakeholders to identify governance and release process challenges and devise effective technical solutions.
• Improve developer workflows by advancing tooling, automation, self-service capabilities, and engineering processes.
• Share expertise via documentation, mentoring, pairing, and establishing engineering best practices.
• Contribute to cross-team infrastructure, tooling, and engineering frameworks.
• Effectively communicate trade-offs in architecture and engineering decisions to build team consensus.

Qualifications and Experience

• Substantial experience in developing and running production-scale systems using technologies such as Go, Ruby on Rails, or equivalents.
• Expertise in designing event-driven or audit-log architectures, including immutable data stores, event sourcing, or append-only data models.
• Strong familiarity with cloud environments, particularly AWS, and managing complex containerized workloads.
• Advanced skills with relational databases like PostgreSQL, focusing on performance tuning and replication strategies.
• Experience addressing distributed systems challenges, observability, infrastructure reliability, and scalability issues.
• Proven background in building or operating release orchestration platforms that manage deployments safely from merging code to production environments.
• Knowledge of continuous deployment tools such as Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Spinnaker, Flux, or similar technologies.
• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration tools like Temporal or comparable systems to coordinate complex deployment steps.
• In-depth understanding of progressive deployment methodologies including canary testing, blue/green releases, phased rollouts, feature flagging, health monitoring for promotions, and rollback automation.
• Ability to design unified self-service deployment systems with appropriate governance and guardrails across multiple teams or departments.
• Experience applying DORA metrics and enforcing release governance, compliance, or auditing practices within large or regulated organizations.
• Integration experience with source control and CI/CD platforms such as GitHub or GitLab.
• Strong communication skills adapted to remote-first teams, capable of translating complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• A collaborative, pragmatic mindset balancing technical excellence with business priorities.
• Comfortable mentoring peers and leading technical discussions across teams.
• Additional advantageous skills include Kubernetes, Terraform, infrastructure-as-code, Kafka, Flink, SRE methods, systems programming, Linux/Unix internals, and cloud security.

Benefits

• Competitive salary with equity and benefits.
• Remote-first, flexible work environment, open to candidates across ANZ and US-Pacific regions.
• Engaging technical challenges in large-scale engineering and software delivery domains.
• Opportunities for professional advancement and leadership influence.
• A collaborative, inclusive culture valuing innovation and autonomy.

Additional Information

The hiring process is managed by the partner employer after initial AI-assisted candidate matching. Applicant data will be processed in compliance with relevant data protection laws and used to evaluate fit and share with the recruiting organization. AI tools support but do not replace human decisions during recruitment.