Sr Release Manager

Sr Release Manager

Client location: Orlando, FL

Work location: Orlando, FL, CA or Burbank, CA or Anaheim, CA

Work Schedule: Hybrid, 2 days/week onsite

Duration of Assignment: 20+ months

W2 Only Position

JOB DESCRIPTION:

• The Release Manager is expected to facilitate a two week sprint cadence of ceremonies, including scope review, scope lock, environment audit, environment change control, integration testing, security testing, financial regression testing, building toward final certification.
• During this period, the Release Manager will review defects as well as developer and tester status updates and action plans, ensuring that the service meets the requirements of business customers and leadership.
• The Release Manager will also be responsible for the creation of release plans, including task level details and resource planning, and other artifacts directly related to the successful promotion of new or changed services into the production environment
• This role engages with technical design/delivery teams and project managers to ensure risk and business value are balanced with the agility of change requested in a given test cycle
• The Release Manager works to ensure cadenced releases as well as environmental scope questions are addressed in a timely fashion, and that multiple testing stakeholders are aligned with the scope and approach for certification of each sprint
• This role will track and drive resolution to complex service issues related to Release Management processes, potential code collisions, while managing the state of software toggles and other environmental changes.

Continuous Improvement:

• In addition to managing a day to day cadence of Release oversight, this position will assist with the specification, development, research and evaluation of new release standards, processes, and tools that improve our services.
• Applies these standards to resolve or escalate issues with releases or release plans and gives technical briefings to delivery, ADS, and SDS staff members.
• Builds a sense of collaboration across teams in the context of the managed cadence and delivery of outcomes to our business
• Allocates routine tasks and/or project work where appropriate.
• Provides direction, support and guidance to various delivery teams as necessary, in line with individuals skills and abilities.
• Monitors release progress against agreed quality and performance criteria.
• Acts to facilitate effective working relationships between team members, delivery studios, and 3rd party testing teams.
• Identifies the communications needs of each stakeholder group in conjunction with business owners and subject matter experts.
• Translates communications / stakeholder engagement strategies into specific tasks.
• Facilitates open communication and discussion between stakeholders, acting as a single point of contact by developing, maintaining and working comprehensive release, deployment, and environment utilization plans.
• Negotiates with stakeholders at senior manager level, ensuring that organizational policy and strategies are followed.
• Provides informed feedback to promote understanding of Release protocols to new teams and services.

Other Requirements:

• Experience with microservices and modern architecture in AWS and cloud systems is a must.
• Knowledge of industry standard project execution methodologies like Agile/SCRUM, Waterfall and Iterative.
• Understanding of unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, light / dark testing, feature toggles, behavioral testing and continuous integration concepts are key.
• General knowledge of applications that interface with RESTful services including Web services.
• Understanding of broad concepts including, Natural Language Processing, Mobile, Web, IoT, Apps, APIs, Messaging, Databases, Big Data, Networks and their Interactions is needed for successful interaction with development studios.
• Excellent communication and organizational skills are a must.
• Strong working knowledge in industry Change and Release practices and ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Remedy, etc.) .

Qualifications:

• Minimum 5+ years of overall experience in planning, executing, and implementing services/projects/releases, managing a forward-looking calendar of deliverables, working closely with multiple partners.
• Able to escalate project risks and constraints to senior management team in a timely manner and identify and manage project dependencies and critical path.
• Excellent written, verbal communication, and presentation skills at all levels within the organization.
• Excellent critical thinking, strategic planning, and process management skills.
• Ability to work independently with minimal direct supervision.
• High-level of understanding of Independent and Cadenced Release management applications, technologies, deployment processes and tooling.
• High client engagement focus, with experience in leading teams of consultants or cast to a repeatable high quality outcome.
• Strengths in troubleshooting systems, process based workflows, and application delivery concepts (Jenkins /Rundeck / Chef).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience in datacenter migrations and hosting or platform changes.
• Demonstrated experience in Physical to virtual and virtual to cloud migrations during release cadence.
• ITIL V3 certification.

Required Education:

• Bachelor s Degree or equivalent experience