Release Engineering Lead | Platform Engineering | DevOps | Infrastructure Automation

I make complex systems more reliable, and releases more predictable.

While employed at The FreeBSD Foundation and later at Netgate, I served as Release Engineering Team Lead for the FreeBSD Project from 2014 through 2023. In that role I shipped 22 production releases for an operating system running in production at banks, storage vendors, network equipment manufacturers, and across public internet infrastructure. The work meant owning release governance, change control, build and artifact pipelines, and public communication, and it required turning ambiguity into repeatable, accountable process.

• Release engineering and release governance
• Platform reliability and reproducible builds
• Change management and incident response
• Build and release automation, CI/CD architecture
• Unix/Linux and FreeBSD systems, ZFS, jails
• Infrastructure as code and configuration management
• Risk assessment and go/no-go decision frameworks
• Technical documentation, mentorship, and succession planning

• Release Engineering Team Lead, FreeBSD Project, 2014-2023
• Led release engineering for FreeBSD 8.4 through 14.0, delivering 22 production releases
• Carried release engineering through the project's 2020 migration from Subversion to Git without interrupting the release cadence; 13.0 was the first major release produced from the Git repository
• Developed two deputy leads over nearly a decade and executed a planned handover, formally acknowledged by the project's governing body
• FreeBSD Project Committer, 2010-2023, with full commit access across Source, Ports, and Documentation
• 6,600+ commits and 2,600+ change approvals granted to other developers across Source, Ports, and Documentation (commit history)
• Also served on the Documentation Engineering, Security, and Cluster Administration Teams

• Thermite — the FreeBSD release build automation, published standalone. Configuration-driven build matrix engine handling isolated release builds, artifact staging, checksum reporting, and cloud image publication.
• mailtools (2026) — utilities for large-scale Maildir migration and integrity verification. Applied to a 26-year, 2.34-million-message archive: per-month foldering, timestamp reconstruction from message headers, and a manifest-driven apply, verify, and rollback workflow.

I am interested in senior release engineering, platform engineering, and technical operations roles where ownership, reliability, and reproducibility are the job, not a side effect of it.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenjbarber