Software Release Manager

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Define, implement, and manage the AmSC software release process across multiple development teams and institutions.
• Develop and maintain release calendars, readiness criteria, versioning conventions, branching strategies, release checklists, and change log processes.
• Facilitate release readiness reviews, go/no-go decisions, deployment planning, and post-release retrospectives.
• Track release scope, risks, blockers, defects, dependencies, and acceptance criteria across multiple teams and repositories.
• Establish practical release governance for a codebase that has grown organically through research-driven development.
• Communicate release status, risks, readiness gaps, and delivery confidence to technical teams, product leadership, project management, and stakeholders.
• Support a distributed, multi-institutional team by clarifying ownership, handoffs, contribution workflows, and integration expectations.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, physical sciences, information systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in software release management, release engineering, DevOps coordination, or technical delivery in a complex software environment.
• Experience working with distributed software teams, multi-team delivery structures, or multi-institutional technical collaborations.
• Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including version control, branching strategies, CI/CD, automated testing, code review, issue tracking, release tagging, and deployment workflows.
• Experience with tools such as Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Confluence or equivalent systems.
• Ability to bring structure to ambiguous, rapidly evolving, or organically developed software projects.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, organizational skills, and attention to detail.
• Demonstrated ability to identify risks, dependencies, process gaps, and blockers, and drive them toward resolution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with research software, scientific computing, HPC, cloud platforms (including AWS), data-intensive systems, distributed systems, or AI/ML infrastructure.
• Experience transitioning research prototypes or exploratory codebases into maintainable, testable, production-oriented software systems.
• Experience supporting release processes for API-driven platforms, federated systems, infrastructure services, or user-facing technical platforms.
• Experience working in national laboratories, universities, government-funded research programs, or complex scientific collaborations.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices, containerization, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, cloud services, HPC systems, or scientific workflow platforms.
• Agile, Scrum, DevOps, ITIL, or release management certifications (e.g. ITIL4).