My build and deploy phase is slow with a long maintenance window, can you speed it up?

Yes. A long deploy phase means real downtime on each release. The usual fixes: move static-content deployment into the build phase, tune SCD_THREADS and SCD_MATRIX in .magento.env.yaml, trim unused locales, and enable the post-deploy warm-up hook. We typically cut multi-minute maintenance windows down to seconds while keeping the pipeline reproducible.