Actively drive release planning with development, QA, and operations teams, ensuring alignment to release achievements.
Collaborate with development, QA, and operations teams to plan and coordinate continuous software releases.
Define and implement clear release scope, schedule, and dependencies to ensure timely and smooth deployments.
Create and submit change records for process and audit compliance. Participate in Technical Change Advisory and Review Boards.
Involvement in planning, testing, tracking, release, deployment, communication, and risk management.
Supervise all aspects of the release lifecycle from planning to execution, ensuring accountability across teams.
Coordinate and participate actively in planned downtimes. Contribute to root cause analysis and report on release outages and active release upgrades.
Proactively identify blockers and risks, driving timely resolutions.
Ensure rigorous adherence to change, testing, and deployment policies before approving production releases.
Oversee planned downtimes and ensure that releases meet operational reliability standards.
Own and drive root cause analysis (RCA) efforts for any release outages or failures.
Push teams towards achieving higher efficiency and quality through automation and process improvements.

Release Automation & Environment Management:

Champion CI/CD best practices, ensuring efficient automated deployments via AWS CI/CD, GitLab CI/CD, or similar tools.
Manage version control repositories, ensuring branching strategies to minimize conflicts and ensure stability.
Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices using tools like Terraform, Morpheus, or CloudFormation.
Lead various development, testing, staging, and production environments, ensuring consistency and reliability.

Quality Assurance & Continuous Improvement:

Establish and implement quality gates in collaboration with QA teams.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives to refine release processes, minimizing defects and deployment risks.
Analyze trends from past releases and implement measurable improvements.

Communication & Stakeholder Management:

Act as the central point of accountability for release readiness and execution.
Provide real-time transparency into release status, risks, and mitigation plans.
Ensure clear and timely communication of release schedules, changes, and impact assessments.

Incident Management:

Work closely with SRE teams to address any post-release incidents or issues, contributing to rapid resolution and root cause analysis.
Provide immediate report out to leadership on findings and next steps.

Required Qualifications:

Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related fields.
5-8 years of validated experience as a DevOps Release Manager or similar role in a fast-paced software development environment.
Proven understanding of DevOps practices, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and related tools.
Proficiency in CI/CD tools such as AWS CI/CD, GitLab CI/CD, or others.
Hands-on experience with version control systems (AWS Code Commit, Git, SVN) and branching strategies.
Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, Morpheus.
Understanding of Agile methodologies and their application in release management.
Proven ability to coordinate multi-functional work teams toward task completion.
Effective leadership and analytical skills.
Strong written, verbal communication skills.
Problem-solving skills and ability to adapt to evolving requirements.

Preferred Qualifications:

8-10 years of experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., EKS, ECS, Docker, Kubernetes).
Relevant certifications in DevOps or related fields are a plus.
SAFE Agile RTE certification or Scaled Agile SAFE certification.

DevOps Release Manager