The Release Engineer SME is the senior release engineering specialist responsible for architecting and managing end-to-end software release pipelines across Development, Integration, Staging, and Production environments. This role designs CI/CD-driven delivery workflows, defines release governance, and ensures deployments are reliable, repeatable, and auditable for mission-critical applications in a highly regulated government setting. The SME partners with development, QA, operations, and security stakeholders to continuously improve release processes, reduce risk, and adopt modern DevOps and site reliability practices.
Key Responsibilities- Architect and manage end-to-end release pipelines using CI/CD platforms, scripting, and automation to orchestrate builds, tests, and deployments across multiple environments.
- Define and enforce release governance, including change controls, versioning conventions, release windows, and approval workflows suitable for mission-critical and highly regulated systems.
- Coordinate cross-functional release activities with development, QA, operations, and security teams, ensuring dependencies are managed and release content is fully validated before production deployment.
- Implement and maintain rollback, hotfix, and emergency release procedures that minimize downtime and risk while supporting strict service-level and compliance requirements.
- Develop and maintain comprehensive release documentation, including deployment procedures, configuration baselines, release notes, and environment inventories to support repeatability and auditability.
- Monitor application and environment health during and after releases using logging, metrics, and observability tools to quickly identify and remediate deployment-related issues.
- Optimize build and deployment processes by identifying bottlenecks, introducing automation, and aligning tooling and practices with DevOps and site reliability engineering principles.
- Assure compatibility and configuration integrity of software across target platforms, environments, and dependencies, including infrastructure-as-code and containerized workloads where applicable.
Required Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
- Typically 10-15 years of experience in software engineering or DevOps with extensive focus on release management and production deployments in complex, regulated environments.
- Demonstrated expertise architecting and operating CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes for multi-tier, mission-critical applications.
- Experience defining and enforcing release governance, including change management, version control strategies, and production readiness criteria.
- Strong background with modern release and deployment patterns such as blue-green, canary, and progressive delivery, as applicable to the environment.
- Active TS/SCI security clearance
- U.S. citizenship, as required to support a federal IT environment.
Preferred Qualifications- Deep experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms and related release automation frameworks.
- Familiarity with DevOps and SRE practices, including reliability engineering, observability, and resilience patterns for production systems.
- Relevant certifications in DevOps, cloud platforms, or CI/CD tooling that demonstrate advanced release engineering expertise.
- Experience supporting large-scale, distributed applications leveraging infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).
Compensation RangesCompensation ranges for ASM Research positions vary depending on multiple factors; including but not limited to, location, skill set, level of education, certifications, client requirements, contract-specific affordability, government clearance and investigation level, and years of experience. The compensation displayed for this role is a general guideline based on these factors and is unique to each role. Monetary compensation is one component of ASM's overall compensation and benefits package for employees.
EEO RequirementsIt is the policy of ASM that an individual's race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation or national origin are not and will not be considered in any personnel or management decisions. We affirm our commitment to these fundamental policies.
All recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting for all job classifications is done without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, or age. All decisions on employment are made to abide by the principle of equal employment.
Physical Requirements
The physical requirements described in "Knowledge, Skills and Abilities" above are representative of those which must be met by an employee to successfully perform the primary functions of this job. (For example, "light office duties' or "lifting up to 50 pounds" or "some travel" required.) Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualifying disabilities, who are otherwise qualified, to perform the primary functions.
DisclaimerThe preceding job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
