Release Manager

About the Role:

We are seeking a highly skilled and detail-oriented Release Manager to own and orchestrate our end-to-end software release lifecycle. You will serve as the central coordination hub between engineering, QA, DevOps, product, and business stakeholders — ensuring that software is delivered reliably, on schedule, and with minimal risk to production environments. This role demands both deep technical fluency and exceptional organizational leadership.

Key Responsibilities:

Release Planning & Coordination

Define, own, and continuously refine the release calendar across multiple product lines and environments

Lead release planning sessions, coordinating dependencies across engineering squads, QA, infrastructure, and product teams

Establish and enforce release governance processes, branching strategies, and code freeze policies

Facilitate Go/No-Go decisions by aggregating readiness signals from all stakeholders

Deployment & Pipeline Oversight

Oversee CI/CD pipeline health, ensuring automated build, test, and deployment stages are performant and reliable

Partner with DevOps/Platform engineers to design and improve deployment automation (blue/green, canary, rolling releases)

Manage environment promotion flows (Dev → Staging → Production), enforcing quality gates at each stage

Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to standardize environment configuration

Risk Management & Incident Response

Identify, document, and mitigate release risks before they reach production

Own rollback and hotfix procedures; lead rapid response during release-related incidents

Conduct post-release reviews and blameless post-mortems, driving actionable improvements

Maintain and test disaster recovery runbooks related to deployment failures

Stakeholder Communication

Produce clear, timely release notes, deployment summaries, and status reports for both technical and executive audiences

Act as the single point of contact for release status visibility across the organization

Proactively communicate delays, risks, and scope changes with full context and mitigation plans

Process Improvement & Tooling

Continuously evaluate and improve release processes, reducing lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate (DORA metrics)

Evaluate and implement release management tooling (e.g., Jira, Confluence, LaunchDarkly, Spinnaker, ArgoCD)

Champion a DevOps culture of shared ownership, automation-first thinking, and continuous delivery

Compliance & Audit Readiness

Ensure releases adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements (ISO 27001, GDPR, where applicable)

Maintain complete audit trails of all changes, approvals, and deployments

Enforce change management policies aligned with ITIL or equivalent frameworks

Requirements:
Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in release management, DevOps engineering, or a closely related technical role
• Proven track record managing complex, multi-team software releases in fast-paced Agile/SAFe environments
• Deep understanding of CI/CD principles and hands-on experience with pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or equivalent)
• Strong familiarity with version control systems (Git), branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development), and merge management
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker)
• Proficiency with project and issue tracking tools (Jira, Confluence)
• Solid understanding of QA processes, test automation integration, and quality gate design
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills — able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders under pressure

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with feature flag management
• Familiarity with GitOps tooling IaC (Terraform)
• Knowledge of ITIL change management processes and DORA metrics
• Relevant certifications: AWS DevOps Professional, , ITIL Foundation, SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE), or PMP
• Experience in regulated industries (Entertainment, Aggregation, Marketplace)
• Scripting proficiency in Python, Bash, or similar for release automation