Staff Engineer Team Lead, Release Engineering

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Release Strategy & Architecture: Drive the organizational strategy for release management. Evaluate and optimize branching paradigms (e.g., Trunk-Based vs. Gitflow) to balance developer velocity with release stability.
• Divergence Resolution: Audit and resolve discrepancies between mainline and active release branches. Enforce a "Mainline First" policy to reduce technical debt and manual cherry-picking.
• Continuous Improvement: Develop and iterate on robust, gated testing to ensure main-branch stability, preventing the need for complex, fragmented branching models.
• Release Governance & Strategic Architecture: Define, enforce code and execute promotion policies, branching strategies (e.g., Trunk-Based vs. Gitflow), and release lifecycles to ensure release isolation and stability.
• Shift-Left Quality Leadership: Drive shift-left quality initiatives by specifying and generating automated tests across all pipeline stages, ensuring quality is integrated throughout the release lifecycle rather than…
• Release Process Standardization: Audit, unify, and standardize release documentation and governance workflows across the organization to eliminate tribal knowledge and empower the broader engineering organization.
• Release Validation & Gating: Oversee the evolution and content in all release pipelines stages to minimize branch breakages and increase release quality.
• Cross-Functional Integration: Collaborate with Autonomy teams to seamlessly and safely integrate necessary fast-forward patches into release branches.

Job requirements

• Experience: 5+ years of professional experience in the autonomous driving or robotics industry, specifically within release engineering or simulation.
• Autonomy Expertise: Strong understanding of autonomy systems, including Localization, Perception, Prediction, Planning, Control, and Autonomy Platforms.
• Technical Leadership: Experience working on and leading large-scale cross-functional projects and managing engineering teams.
• Engineering Foundation: BS or MS in Engineering or equivalent knowledge and work experience.
• Programming Proficiency: Proficiency with C++/Python and advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines.
• Problem-Solving Skills: Demonstrated ability to think logically, remove bias from problem evaluation, and data mine for insights on deficiencies and overlooked optimizations.
• Collaboration: Strong teamwork, communication, presentation and writing skills for working with developers, program managers, and leadership.
• Strategic Problem Solving: Proven ability to navigate complex engineering debates (e.g., Trunk-Based vs. Gitflow), provide data-driven recommendations, and lead architectural shifts.