I was interested to know what companies feelings where about people not necessarily with programming experience (I can program C++ but no work experience) but build and release experience. My first job since graduating is a build and release engineer for a large organisation. Is there a place for people with skills like this in a games company? Could it be a way of entry to eventually become a programmer?

"Is there a place for people with skills like this in a games company? "

Yes. It's actually quite an in-demand background... good people are bonkersly hard to find. These days games need testing across huge numbers of targets, and they have vast build times. Pre-computing data for levels, asset manipulation -- all those sorts of things fall under this sort of job description.

Things to have (or gain); experience with distributed build servers and environments (incredibuild, teamcity, bamboo). You'd probably need to have both Linux and Windows admin experience. Scripting languages like Python are good.

Yeah, definitely. In my experience there's also some overlap with QA - the build pipeline is often where you want to integrate unit testing, particularly if you're doing any kind of continuous integration, and of course there's often some kind of QA acceptance testing procedure to go through as part of a release programme.