Lead Release Manager

Position: Lead Release Manager

Location: San Francisco, CA (M to T Office, F-Remote)

Duration: 6+ months contract to hire
Interview Process: Likely 2 rounds (both 30-45 minutes): 1st interview with Manager, 2nd interview with a domain-specific counterpart

If this opportunity interests you, please reply to this email with your updated resume and availability for a quick conversation.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Project Description:

Looking for a mid-level Release Manager with an engineering background for their Ecommerce team. This candidate will build and manage various IT applications release and production schedules, lead merge strategies and align cross-channel projects. This candidate will act as "Air Traffic Controller", ensuring all teams adhere to various timelines & communicate testing, validation, deployment, etc. are all tracking correctly. This role will not only lead release activities across the ecommerce domain, but will also be working cross-functionally with Supply Chain & other domains.

Three (3 )Main domains:

• Ecommerce space (including website & content management)
• supply chain space (enterprise and logistics)
• Enterprise data analytics and marketing space.

Responsibilities:

• Managing the various schedules release, production changes, project timelines, etc.
• Providing daily metrics/status for environment and project health (Dashboards or other KPI delivery methods).
• Verifying gate completion for projects with PCI/Sox implications (checklist).
• Coordinating projects into existing test environments/maintaining environment schedules
• Building Release schedules and deployment plans to manager and implement a release.
• Active management of issues queue from opened to closed.
• Coordinating with project/application & TDS to ensure 3rd party integrations are configured & tested according to project/release schedules.
• Working with projects, engineering and QA to define upcoming environment requirements and specifications
• Determining & coordinating data requirements and dependencies for upcoming projects
• Work with Engineering/Architects to assess release milestone and adapt/grow them as required over time.
• Define and enforce entry criteria for Production. Acting as a gate.
• Cross channel involvement in aligning projects
• Manage branching & merge strategies across development initiatives and phased releases
• Implement tactical improvements for version & configuration management, build/release tools and processes
• Lead release planning across organization with consideration of business events, maintenance windows and production support changes
• Establish and drive release strategy and process with application/systems engineering and operations.

Top Requirements (Must haves):

• 5+ years of experience in Deployment/Release Management in an enterprise software (not hardware) environment with a background in release engineering
• Deployment day to day release management: managing all release activities across many systems/applications. This includes upfront planning for releases, working with product/engineering, working with third party vendors, and ultimately putting software into the production system. Experience executing a plan, managing change requests, managing issues that come up, managing dependencies, etc.
• Process change management; looking for this person to come in, evaluate the environment, and define/improve/optimize the release process. This may include documentation, process improvement, implementing best practices, understanding what the problems are, and what is the journey to get to the next evolution, implement post-mortems, etc.
• Communication leading release discussion with leadership (need to be comfortable going between tech/non-tech team members), consolidating efforts with processes
• Must has some level of experience within Ecommerce domain
• Technical background comfortable working with the engineering team, good understanding of SDLC.
• Experience working with both onshore & offshore teams
• Development cycle is pretty aggressive, releases are every 2 weeks, managing 2-3 releases in parallel (different stages)
• Independent worker, self-starter, self-sufficient.