Release Manager

Job Description -

Release Management:

• Accountable for creating, managing, and maintaining release processes, schedules, and environment configurations
• Collaborate with leadership and customers to understand their perspectives on balancing speed, risk, and environmental stability
• Identify and analyze risks, conflicts, and impacts within and across multiple releases; work with project teams to mitigate issues
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to maintain high-quality deployment artifacts as they move through the entire release lifecycle
• Manage, plan, and negotiate release activities while coordinating with development teams for environment readiness
• Prepare implementation plans, review with project teams and stakeholders including contact lists, communications, back-outs, and production verifications
• Gather application, component (infrastructure), and dependency data required for releases
• Execute production deployments and implementation plans during the production readiness phase
• Communicate implementation plans, release statuses, issues, and resolutions to stakeholders and leadership in a timely manner
• Lead RCA and post-implementation review meetings; gather and coordinate implementation issue resolutions and communications
• Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews
• Participate in CAB meetings to discuss release scope and/or roadblocks
• Develop and present executive-level reports, presentations, and analyses of initiatives, including roadmap and release execution

Environment Management:

• Monitor pre-production and production environments to ensure stability, performance, and availability
• Identify, troubleshoot, and resolve pre-production incidents in a timely manner to prevent production impact
• Understand and manage technical aspects of application integration, cloud resources, infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines
• Maintain documentation related to environment configurations, build and release procedures, notification lists, and dependencies
• Identify improvement opportunities in environment processes and implement automation solutions to enhance efficiency
• Coordinate with development, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure environments align with application requirements
• Responsible for handling the pre-prod deployment window and working closely with teams for process improvements
• Ensure environment readiness for all releases by validating configurations, integrations, and dependencies
• Perform release and environment management assessments; identify process improvement opportunities and ensure adherence to strategies

Continuous Improvement:

• Make improvements in methodologies used for configuration management and software development processes
• Identify efficiencies in release and environment processes; propose and implement automation solutions
• Accountable for developing process improvements and training stakeholders on release and environment management processes

Required Skills:

• 10+ years of software/SaaS experience with 5+ years in Release/Project/Program Management
• Strong technical understanding of SDLC lifecycle, application architecture, integration patterns, cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform), and CI/CD tools
• 2+ years experience with Change Management and ServiceNow as a service management tool
• Proven organizational, presentation, and communication skills (written and verbal) with technical and non-technical staff at all management levels
• Strong knowledge of software development business processes, practices, and environment management
• Experience with project management, software development tools, and infrastructure monitoring platforms
• Ability to manage critical situations across teams to ensure release success with flexibility to accommodate evolving business needs
• Experience creating large-scale implementation plans, managing and coordinating them with multiple system integrations and dependencies
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud resource management, and infrastructure-as-code tools
• Release and/or project management experience on large IT programs supporting enterprise or government customers
• Problem-solving skills with ability to quickly identify root causes and implement solutions in pre-production environments