Lead, Release Management

Responsibilities

• Develop and manage release schedules ensuring alignment with business and technology strategies.
• Cook up cross-functional teams including Development, QA, QE, DevOps, IT Security, UAT, Support and Product Management to ensure successful releases.
• Enforce release governance and maintain documentation, ensuring adherence to best practices and SDLC production requirements.
• Maintain release progress and activities within required tools and document repositories.
• Identify and mitigate risks escalating as needed to clear blockers.
• Oversee cross team and cross product release dependencies.
• Develop production readiness reviews.
• Run release deployments and post-deploy hypercare.
• Communicate release plans, impacts to stakeholders and issues throughout the release life cycle.
• Drive Continuous improvement and automation initiatives to enhance release efficiency, reduce deployment risks and optimize processes.
• Lead projects that extend beyond standard software releases.
• Lead and mentor release managers, ensuring best practices are followed across all releases.
• Serve as main point of contact for senior leadership regarding releases plans, risks and business impacts.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science/Information Systems or equivalent work experience required.
• Experience: Extensive experience managing software releases across all phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), including planning, development, testing, deployment, and post-production support.
• Leadership: Strong understanding of Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, and hybrid SDLC methodologies, with the ability to adapt release processes to varying project requirements.
• Coordination: Proven leadership experience mentoring release managers, project teams, and stakeholders on SDLC and release management best practices.
• Process: Demonstrated expertise in coordinating cross-functional teams to ensure successful delivery of software releases aligned with SDLC governance and quality standards.
• Management: Experience defining and enforcing release management processes, controls, and best practices throughout the SDLC.
• Risk Mitigation: Experience managing release schedules, dependencies, risks, and change activities across multiple concurrent development initiatives.
• Partnerships: Experience partnering with Development, QA, Product Management, Infrastructure, Security, and Operations teams to ensure SDLC compliance and release readiness.
• Decision Making: Proven ability to lead release planning, readiness reviews, go/no-go decision meetings, and post-implementation retrospectives.
• Quality Assurance: Strong understanding of software quality assurance practices, defect management, configuration management, and change control within the SDLC.
• Improvement: Experience establishing release metrics, KPIs, and reporting to drive continuous improvement across software delivery processes.
• Training: Formal training in project management (Agile, Waterfall, Scrum) preferred.
• Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in Release Management, Program Management, or Software Delivery roles, including leadership responsibility for enterprise-scale SDLC initiatives and complex software deployments.
• Technical Knowledge: Experience with Jira & ServiceNow.