I've never been the "build guy" full time, but I have been the developer who enjoyed/took care of the process/version control/scripting. It is worth saying that there is a great series of best practices, etc, that are worth documenting (and publicizing) around builds. (Even if it is hard to justify investment in improving builds sometimes.)
I've certainly enjoyed the technical challenge of bringing in best practices and better tools, and I've really enjoyed playing the emissary between dev and ops (a co-worker once called me a "one man DevOps team"). But the fact that there's no visibility until things go wrong - there's a real problem with the responsibility/authority ratio in that role.
