Developers and builders

Developer and Build Engineer roles often overlap, especially in smaller teams, but they serve distinct purposes and have unique responsibilities in software development:

In smaller teams they collaborate on CI/CD to integrate new code smoothly into build process, troubleshoot issues related to dependencies, build breaks etc.

Key Differences

Focus on Code vs. Process: Developers are focused on the functionality and quality of the code, while Build Engineers concentrate on the efficiency, reliability, and maintainability of the build and deployment process.

Development Cycle: Developers primarily work on code creation and implementation; Build Engineers focus on deployment and ensuring code is correctly compiled, linked, and packaged.

Tool-sets: While there maybe some overlap in tools they use, there focus might be different, e.g. developers might care a lot of IDEs, development tools, scanners, linters, language servers etc. and programming languages to use. Build engineers might not prioritize different programming languages, since it will complicate builds, They may consider dependencies, correct rebuilds of all affected sources at higher priority

It is important to understand these key differences. Workflows that are good for enhancing developer productivity may differ from build engineers. They may be working on taking care of same codebase, although different aspects of project.