Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Job Title: Release Manager
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Model: On-site / Hybrid / Remote (as applicable)
Job Summary
We are seeking an experienced Release Manager to lead and coordinate end-to-end software release management activities across multiple development teams and IT environments. The ideal candidate will be responsible for release planning, scheduling, deployment coordination, risk management, and ensuring successful delivery of high-quality software releases aligned with business objectives.
The Release Manager will collaborate with development, QA, DevOps, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders to ensure releases are delivered on time, within scope, and with minimal business disruption.
Key Responsibilities
- Own and manage the end-to-end release management lifecycle, including release planning, scheduling, coordination, deployment, validation, and post-release reviews.
- Develop and maintain release calendars, release plans, milestones, dependencies, and deployment schedules.
- Coordinate releases across development, QA, staging, UAT, and production environments.
- Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, QA, infrastructure, security, and product teams to ensure release readiness.
- Manage release risks, dependencies, change requests, deployment approvals, and rollback plans.
- Ensure compliance with change management processes, ITIL practices, and organizational release governance standards.
- Facilitate release readiness reviews, Go/No-Go meetings, stakeholder communications, and release status reporting.
- Coordinate CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes in partnership with DevOps and engineering teams.
- Track release progress, identify bottlenecks, and proactively resolve issues that may affect delivery timelines.
- Maintain release documentation, deployment checklists, implementation plans, rollback procedures, and post-implementation reports.
- Lead incident coordination and support root cause analysis for release-related production issues.
- Identify opportunities to improve release automation, deployment reliability, and delivery efficiency.
- Provide regular updates to management and business stakeholders on release status, risks, and outcomes.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of experience in IT release management, software delivery, project management, or a related discipline.
- 3+ years of experience coordinating software releases across multiple teams and environments.
- Strong understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Agile methodologies, Scrum, and DevOps practices.
- Experience with change management, release governance, risk assessment, and deployment planning.
- Familiarity with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.
- Experience with project and release tracking tools such as Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, or equivalent tools.
- Understanding of cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to manage multiple concurrent releases and prioritize competing business requirements.
Preferred Qualifications
- ITIL Foundation certification or equivalent knowledge of IT service management practices.
- PMP, Scrum Master, or other relevant project/release management certification.
- Experience with enterprise applications, microservices, APIs, and distributed systems.
- Familiarity with automated testing, deployment orchestration, infrastructure as code, and monitoring tools.
- Experience managing production releases in regulated or large enterprise environments.
- Knowledge of incident management, problem management, and continuous improvement practices.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- On-time release delivery rate.
- Release success rate and deployment failure rate.
- Number of production incidents attributable to releases.
- Change failure rate and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
- Release readiness and change approval compliance.
- Reduction in deployment lead time and release-related defects.
- Stakeholder satisfaction and effectiveness of release communications.
Work Location and Collaboration
This position is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and may require collaboration with geographically distributed teams across different time zones. The selected candidate should be comfortable coordinating cross-functional teams, managing release timelines, and supporting critical production deployments when required.
Equal Opportunity Statement
The employer is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to qualified applicants. Employment decisions are made in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local employment laws.
