Principal Engineer - Release Engineering

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Posting Open Date: Updated March 31, 2026

Anticipated Posting Close Date*: April 15, 2026
*Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

 

Principal Release Engineer 

We are looking for a Principal Release Engineer to join Fastly’s Release Engineering team. The Release Engineer is responsible for the set-up, maintenance and ongoing development of continuous build / integration and deployment infrastructure. In this role you will create and maintain fully automated CI build processes for multiple environments, including our global edge cache fleet, internal applications, and applications hosted in AWS and GCP. The ideal candidate will care deeply about providing other engineers with a seamless release experience, and have a deep understanding of what engineers care about, how they ship code, and what world-class delivery infrastructure looks like.

 

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate release tooling across building, packaging, signing, artifact management, and deploying software.
• Drive initiatives that make our engineers happier and more productive by reducing lead time for changes.
• Collaborate with development and SRE teams to develop policies, standards, guidelines, governance and related guidance for CI/D operations.
• Support developers from with build automation, merge resolution, CI, test automation, deployment based on tools usage and policies, standards.
• Troubleshoot issues along the CI/D pipeline.
• Participate in on-call support rotation

 

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years of related professional platform engineering experience, including designing and operating distributed systems in production
• Experience building internal developer platforms or “paved roads” at scale (e.g., service catalogs, self‑service infrastructure, standardized delivery pipelines)
• Demonstrated success leading complex, cross‑functional technical initiatives with broad organizational impact
• Strong systems design and architecture skills with a pragmatic approach to tradeoffs, risk management, and incremental delivery
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following languages: Ruby, Python, Go.
• Experience with Linux and containerization, particularly with Docker & orchestration platforms like Kubernetes
• Expertise with automation tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions or Dagger.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks such as Chef, Terraform, Ansible, etc
• Knowledge of source code control management systems and configuration management (i.e. Git, GitHub, etc) and code branching/merging strategies
• Experience with a Cloud-based environment, particularly AWS and/or GCP. Both would be ideal!
• Good understanding of quality control and test automation in agile-based continuous integration environments
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to influence without authority and align diverse stakeholders

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these: 

• Varnish, Nginx or other cache and proxy servers
• Experience with Omnibus and/or Debian packaging
• Experience with artifact repositories such as Artifactory or Sonatype Nexus
• Some experience with SQL and relational databases administration (i.e. Oracle, MySQL)
• Open source license tracking, auditing and reporting

 

Work Hours:

• This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as needed for on call support 

 

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements: 

The preferred hybrid locations for this position are:

• San Francisco, CA
• Denver, CO
• New York, NY

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.  

We are also willing to consider highly qualified remote candidates in the United States.

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