Release Analyst - CI/CD

Job Duties

• Organize and lead effective release planning meetings, ensuring cross-functional alignment across application, infrastructure, and cloud teams.
• Define and maintain a structured release calendar for applications and infrastructure, including OS patching, cloud deployments, middleware upgrades, and security updates.
• Establish a consistent and predictable release cadence across IT applications, cloud platforms, and infrastructure components.
• Manage end-to-end infrastructure/application release cycles, coordinating on-premises and/or cloud environments to minimize disruptions.
• Ensure adherence to enterprise IT policies and security standards while executing application and infrastructure releases.
• Track release deliverables, security compliance checks, and functional/security test approvals, ensuring production readiness.
• Monitor infrastructure changes, including system upgrades, network modifications, storage enhancements, and patching cycles.
• Provide oversight for OS patching, covering major and minor updates for Windows, Linux along with firmware updates for storage and network CIs and other enterprise systems.
• Oversee cloud infrastructure deployments - Azure, ensuring successful configuration and validation.
• Collaborate with DevOps and IT System Reliability teams to integrate automated release pipelines, CI/CD best practices, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies.
• Utilize IT automation tools (Ansible, Terraform) for infrastructure provisioning and release management.
• Ensure infrastructure releases comply with security policies and CIP regulatory requirements.
• Track and report key release performance metrics, including patch deployment success rates, release cycle efficiency, system downtime, and rollback trends.
• Facilitate root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortem reviews for failed or delayed releases, driving process improvements.
• Collaborate with development, operations, cloud, and security teams to optimize infrastructure release management.
• Provide support to the Change Advisory Board (CAB), ensuring infrastructure changes are properly assessed and documented.
• Manage cross-functional dependencies for application and infrastructure releases, maintaining up-to-date documentation.
• Utilize Jira/ServiceNow to manage release workflows, change approvals, and infrastructure deployment tracking.
• Support ITSM processes, including Change, Release, Incident, and Problem Management.
• Design, build, and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines for application and infrastructure delivery across all supported technology stacks.
• Integrate automated risk scoring, readiness checks, and quality gates into release orchestration workflows.
• Automate RFC and change record creation in ITSM platforms upon release readiness, supporting risk-based change classification.
• Implement and maintain break-glass emergency deployment controls with full audit logging and traceability.
• Establish and track software delivery performance metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and report results to leadership.
• Contribute to the evolution of release orchestration tooling, including rule-based and AI-augmented deployment decision frameworks.

Qualifications

• Sr level: Requires minimum 5 years job related work experience in excess of degree requirements.
• Lead: Requires minimum 8 years job related work experience in excess of degree requirements.
• Minimum 3 years of experience in IT Change & Release Management, specifically for infrastructure releases (OS patching, security updates, cloud deployments, and system upgrades).
• Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience designing, building, or managing CI/CD pipelines for application and/or infrastructure delivery across multi-stack environments.
• Minimum 5 years of progressively responsible experience in system integration, infrastructure release management, or IT operations — with demonstrated ownership of end-to-end release lifecycle execution.
• Strong knowledge of ITIL best practices for Change, Release, Incident, and Problem Management, including risk-based change classification (Standard, Normal, and Emergency changes).
• Demonstrated experience implementing or operating release governance frameworks, including automated quality gates, readiness checks, and deployment approval workflows within CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrated Experience of automated deployment strategies such as blue/green, canary, or rolling deployments and when to apply each in a production environment.
• Demonstrated Experience integrating CI/CD pipelines with ITSM platforms (ServiceNow or equivalent) for automated change record creation, approval routing, and release traceability.
• Familiarity with database/databricks/cloud applications change management practices, including version-controlled schema migrations and automated rollback strategies within release pipelines.
• Experience tracking and reporting software delivery performance metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery) to drive continuous improvement.

Certifications

• ITIL v4 Certification (Highly Preferred).
• Azure Certification is a plus.
• Certified OpenShift Administrator or similar infrastructure-related certification is a plus.

Technical Expertise

• Experience with ServiceNow for managing release and infrastructure deployment workflows.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure release management, including server patching, database updates, cloud infrastructure rollouts, and network changes.
• Working knowledge of IT automation tools (Ansible, Terraform) for infrastructure provisioning and release management.
• Experience with DevOps & CI/CD pipelines to automate application release processes.
• Familiarity with SQL, scripting languages (Python, Shell, PowerShell), and data analysis is a plus.