The Release Engineer provides software and services to software engineering and software quality assurance teams. These software and services are usually called a build, release or delivery. The Release Engineer delivers all the pieces in a coordinated fashion, recording exactly the versions of files that went into creating a particular build.

The Release Engineer understands all the processes involved in reliably reproducing the software. All software projects, whether using agile methods, RUP or the waterfall model rely on many and frequent iterations of the build cycle, from build/test to debug/rework and back to build, before the software project is complete. Release Engineering brings consistency, reproducibility and verifiability to the build and release cycle.