Release Manager SME

Key Responsibilities

• Arcitect and manage end-to-end release pipelines using CI/CD platforms, scripting, and automation to orchestrate builds, tests, and deployments across multiple environments.
• Define and enforce release governance, including change controls, versioning conventions, release windows, and approval workflows suitable for mission-critical and highly regulated systems.
• Cooordinate cross-functional release activities with development, QA, operations, and security teams, ensuring dependencies are managed and release content is fully validated before production deployment.
• Implement and maintain rollback, hotfix, and emergency release procedures that minimize downtime and risk while supporting strict service-level and compliance requirements.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive release documentation, including deployment procedures, configuration baselines, release notes, and environment inventories to support repeatability and auditability.
• Monitor application and environment health during and after releases using logging, metrics, and observability tools to quickly identify and remediate deployment-related issues.
• Optimize build and deployment processes by identifying bottlenecks, introducing automation, and aligning tooling and practices with DevOps and site reliability engineering principles.
• Assure compatibility and configuration integrity of software across target platforms, environments, and dependencies, including infrastructure-as-code and containerized workloads where applicable.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Typically 10-15 years of experience in software engineering or DevOps with extensive focus on release management and production deployments in complex, regulated environments.
• Demonstrated expertise architecting and operating CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes for multi-tier, mission-critical applications.
• Experience defining and enforcing release governance, including change management, version control strategies, and production readiness criteria.
• Strong background with modern release and deployment patterns such as blue-green, canary, and progressive delivery, as applicable to the environment.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms and related release automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with DevOps and SRE practices, including reliability engineering, observability, and resilience patterns for production systems.
• Relevant certifications in DevOps, cloud platforms, or CI/CD tooling that demonstrate advanced release engineering expertise.
• Experience supporting large-scale, distributed applications leveraging infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).