Career path of a release engineer
Hello, I am a build and release engineer at Apple, soon to be at Google. I have been in this field for 5 years now. Just wondering what are usually the paths for a person in my field? What is the highest point i can reach in my career? I am good with automation, CI/CD, SCM, Linux, writing tools etc. PS. I have no intention to move into SW dev at this point.
Switch
To what? Also, why do you think switching is my best option?
Switching to SDE will give you more opportunities for future growth.. not only career path but learning something new... You may find a lot of RE with 10+ yrs exp, but most of them are just stuck and don't go outside of their comfort zone
Your career path will be same as a software engineer. If you want to stay as individual contributor: Senior -> staff -> principal release engineer , etc Or be a manager: Release engineer manager -> senior manager -> director , etc
Systems engineering? There is always something to learn in software tools/infrastructure.
It will be the same as the regular engineer's. You'll become either an Eng Manager or Staff/Principal Engineer, depending on what you want. An RE guy I knew became a pretty successful CTO on East coast, and that makes sense considering Build engineers work a lot on putting together everybody's work.
For folks who think there is nothing to go to as a release engineer, check out Seth Vargo ( google youtube devops/sre series) ... Seth was a RE, then an SRE, dev advocate, software engineer, infrastructure engineer.. so many things to do out there .. if you are willing to learn and expand there is no limit
Hi, My Release Engineer interview at Google is scheduled in a week. How was your experience with the interview? Can I DM you?
no career path for release managers/engineers in the near future... If your don't want to do sw dev, explore tpm as an option.
Thanks for the reply. Why do you think there is no future in this field? I see many release engineers have been there for 10+ years at Google.
I think it's a matter of time for these processes to be automated.