Job Title: Senior Release Train Engineer (RTE)
Location: NJ -Clifton, NJ or NYC -51 Madison Ave
Hybrid: Mon&Fri Remote; Tues-Thurs Onsite
Duration: Potential Temp to Perm
Department: Field Experience Technology
Interview: Virtual, 2-4 interviews depending on managers schedules
Senior Release Train Engineer – Technology Operations & Portfolio – Field Experience Technology
As part of Technology, you'll have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking initiatives that shape New York Life's digital landscape. Leverage cutting-edge technologies like Generative AI to increase productivity, streamline processes, and create seamless experiences for clients, agents, and employees. Your expertise fuels innovation, agility, and growth — driving the company's success.
Role Overview:
As a Senior Release Train Engineer within Field Experience Technology, you will lead the delivery practice for our most complex FX capabilities, helping teams plan realistically, deliver predictably, and release with confidence. You will facilitate the planning cadence, keep work flowing, and remove the impediments that slow teams down — so engineering time stays on building products for our advisors and clients.
You will also set the bar for the Release Train Engineering community. Working across Delivery Operations, you will establish the standards for how we plan, release, and report, coach other Release Train Engineers, and represent delivery in leadership forums. You will own the rigor and data quality behind the delivery information leaders rely on.
This is a senior individual contributor role. Your influence will come from credibility and partnership rather than reporting lines — shaping roadmap tradeoffs with product counterparts, challenging direction constructively, and helping FX Technology move from coordinating execution to informing strategy.
What You'll Do:
Reporting to the Technology Operations & Portfolio Leader, your primary focus will be to lead delivery execution for your assigned capabilities and to raise delivery practice across the community. In addition:
- You will facilitate planning and delivery events — including PI planning, backlog preparation, and retrospectives — so teams commit to achievable plans against known capacity.
- You will drive predictable flow by surfacing and removing impediments, managing dependencies and risks across teams, and resolving cross-capability dependencies and escalated risk that cannot be settled at the capability level.
- You will own release readiness for your capabilities and set the release standards other capabilities follow, coordinating the planning, approvals, and communication required to release with confidence.
- You will uphold change management standards across normal, standard, and emergency changes, so delivery meets the governance requirements of a regulated environment, and lead the exception and emergency paths when escalation is required.
- You will own the accuracy of delivery data and reporting for your capabilities, so that status, progress, and capacity information is reliable without teams rebuilding it by hand each cycle.
- You will partner with FX Capability Leads, product partners, and Planning Operations to connect demand and capacity — helping ensure incoming work is planned rather than absorbed mid-cycle, and influence roadmap tradeoffs and sequencing with senior product and technology leaders.
- You will define and steward consistent delivery practice across FX Technology, adopting and adapting shared Agile practices rather than building capability-specific approaches.
- You will coach teams and other Release Train Engineers on Agile ways of working and support continuous improvement.
- You will represent delivery in leadership forums, giving senior stakeholders a clear, risk-aware view of portfolio delivery health and challenging direction constructively where the plan and the capacity do not match.
- You will identify where AI and automation can remove coordination, reporting, and release overhead across capabilities, set that expectation for other Release Train Engineers, and make sure the capacity it frees is visible rather than quietly reabsorbed.
What You'll Bring:
You bring deep experience leading Agile delivery at scale, and the judgment to know when to facilitate, when to coach, and when to escalate. You are comfortable holding teams to a cadence while protecting them from churn, and you build trust quickly with engineers, product partners, and leaders alike. You think in terms of flow — where work is queuing, where handoffs cost time, and what would make the next release smoother than the last.
Beyond your delivery experience, you communicate clearly with both technical and business audiences, stay organized across competing priorities, and treat reporting as a means to better decisions rather than an end in itself. You are credible in a room of senior leaders, comfortable disagreeing well, and motivated by raising the capability of the people around you. You use AI as a normal part of how you work, and you look for where it can take manual effort out of delivery rather than waiting to be asked.
Required Skills:
- Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 9+ years of experience in Agile delivery, with demonstrated experience as a Release Train Engineer supporting multiple teams in a large enterprise.
- Experience facilitating planning cadences and release execution in a multi-team environment, including capabilities with significant complexity, regulatory exposure, or cross-team dependency.
- Strong working knowledge of Jira or equivalent delivery tooling, including the reporting and data hygiene that make delivery information trustworthy.
- Proven ability to manage cross-team dependencies, risks, and impediments through to resolution.
- Strong facilitation, communication, and stakeholder management skills across technical and business partners.
- Demonstrated experience with change and release management practices in a regulated environment, including ITIL-aligned change processes and supporting tooling.
- Demonstrated experience coaching or mentoring other delivery professionals, and influencing senior stakeholders without formal authority.
- Demonstrated use of AI tools to reduce manual delivery, reporting, or coordination effort, and the judgment to know where automation genuinely helps.
Preferred Skills:
- SAFe Release Train Engineer certification (SAFe RTE) or equivalent scaled Agile certification; SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC) or equivalent is a plus.
- Experience in insurance, financial services, or another regulated industry.
- Familiarity with Lean Portfolio Management concepts such as demand shaping, portfolio flow, and capacity planning.
- Experience applying AI or automation tools to reduce manual reporting and coordination effort, including establishing practices others adopted.
- Experience with value stream or flow management tooling.
