Lead Release Engineer

Company

Cox Automotive - USA

Engineering / Product Development

Lead Release Engineer

Manager - Non People LeaderHybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

No

Day

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary of $119,700.00 - $199,500.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join our Release Enablement team — a strategic group focused on transforming how we test, validate, and deploy software into production. This role is critical to achieving our vision of environment harmonization, QA modernization, and accelerated, automated releases.

As a technical leader, you will partner closely with our Lead Software Test Engineer and cross-functional teams to design and implement scalable, reliable, and secure solutions that streamline our release processes. You will bring deep technical expertise, a system-thinking mindset, and a passion for automation and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and implement tools, frameworks, and services that enable faster, safer, and more reliable software releases.
• Lead technical strategy for environment harmonization, deployment automation, and release orchestration.
• Design and build scalable CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure to support multi-environment deployments.
• Integrate and optimize observability, logging, and alerting systems to ensure release traceability and system health.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to modernize testing practices and deployment workflows.
• Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and technical guidance.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and engineering excellence within the team.
• Contribute to technical documentation and knowledge sharing across teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 6 years’ experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master’s degree and 4 years’ experience; a Ph.D. and 1 year of experience; or 10 years’ experience in a related field

• Proficiency with AWS cloud platforms 

• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform). 

• Requires strong knowledge CI/CD tools (e.g. GitHub Actions) 

• Must have a solid understanding of networking, security, and system design principles, and demonstrated ability to lead design reviews, architecture discussions, and postmortems to promote a culture of learning and accountability.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong scripting and programming - .NET (C#), Python, PowerShell, TypeScript.

• Proficiency in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm).

• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., New Relic, PagerDuty).

• Experience with test automation frameworks and integrating quality gates into pipelines.

• Familiarity with progressive delivery (e.g., canary, blue-green deployments).

• Solid understanding of networking, security, and system design principles.

• Knowledge of feature flagging, release toggles, and deployment strategies.

• Experience working in an agile environment (preferred scaled agile)

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

Mentorship & Leadership

• Act as a technical mentor to engineers across the team, helping them grow in areas such as system design, testing, and DevOps practices.

• Provide career development support through regular feedback, pairing sessions, and growth planning.

• Help define and uphold engineering standards, best practices, and team-wide technical direction.

Why Join Us?

You’ll be part of a high-impact team that’s reshaping how software is delivered at scale. If you thrive in a collaborative environment and love solving complex engineering challenges, we’d love to hear from you.

To be employed in this role, you’ll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.Through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers alike, Cox Automotive employees are transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars. Cox Automotive employees get to work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim, all while enjoying the people-centered atmosphere that is central to our life at Cox. Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO). For more details on what benefits you may be offered, visit our benefits page. Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.