Senior Software Engineer

Senior Release Engineer

The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization CI and Release team is looking for a Senior Release Engineer to join us. In this role, you will own and evolve the release pipelines that ship OpenShift Virtualization to production -- from container builds through operator catalog assembly to verified candidate releases. You'll also contribute to the team's internal release observability platform, a Node.js/TypeScript application that provides real-time visibility, gating dashboards, and AI-powered insights to stakeholders across the organization. As a Senior Release Engineer, you will work across both pipeline operations (CI/CD pipelines, GitOps-driven promotions) and tooling development (automation scripts, APIs, monitoring), bridging the gap between build infrastructure and the engineering teams that depend on it. You should be comfortable operating in a GitOps-driven environment, debugging distributed build systems under pressure, and collaborating asynchronously with cross-functional teams across multiple time zones.

What will you do:

• Design, maintain, and troubleshoot CI/CD release pipelines for OpenShift Virtualization component builds and promotions across multiple release streams, using pipeline-as-code and GitOps-driven promotion patterns
• Build and operate container image build systems, managing Dockerfiles, midstream repositories, and operator catalog assembly for a large-scale multi-component product
• Develop and maintain automation tooling in Python and Bash for release workflows -- issue tracker integration, commit tracking, cross-team task coordination, and automated source synchronization between upstream and product repositories
• Contribute to the team's release observability platform (Node.js/TypeScript) -- adding backend services, integrating data sources, and improving release visibility for stakeholders
• Execute and verify production releases: manage smoke testing, gated verification flows, and candidate-release promotions through staged quality gates
• Triage and resolve build and release incidents, perform root cause analysis, and drive post-incident improvements to prevent recurrence
• Coordinate cross-team release activities such as base image rebases, dependency bumps, and version branching across 50+ component repositories
• Document release processes, runbooks, and architectural decisions; support onboarding of new team members.

What will you bring:

• 3-5+ years of experience in release engineering or DevOps, or CI/CD infrastructure roles
• Hands-on experience with container technologies: building container images, managing registries, and operating in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments
• Proficiency with at least one CI/CD pipeline framework (Tekton, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions);
• Familiarity with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Kargo, Flux) is a strong plus
• Solid scripting skills in Python and Bash for automation and tooling
• Demonstrated knowledge with Git, including multi-repo workflows, branching strategies, and merge conflict resolution at scale
• Familiarity with operator lifecycle management (OLM) and the Red Hat operator ecosystem.
• Comfortable reading and writing YAML-heavy configurations (Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipeline definitions, GitOps application specs)
• Strong debugging and incident response skills, ability to trace failures across distributed pipeline stages, container builds, and cluster environments
• Effective asynchronous communication skills, experience collaborating across time zones with distributed engineering teams
• Active GitHub/GitLab profile.

The following are considered a plus:

• Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Kargo, Flux) is a strong plus
• Experience with pipeline-as-code build systems for container image production at scale
• Familiarity with operator catalog assembly
• Exposure to AI/ML tooling for engineering automation (e.g., AI-assisted code review, intelligent alerting, or predictive release quality)
• Experience with issue tracker REST API integration and workflow automation
• Contributions to open source projects
• Knowledge of gRPC, WebSocket, or real-time event-driven architectures
• Experience with Node.js/TypeScript development is a plus, particularly for API and backend service work