Release Manager

Pay rate range - $70/hr. to $72/hr.

Hybrid

Job Description

Release Management:

· Accountable for creating, managing, and maintaining release processes, schedules, and environment configurations

· Collaborate with leadership and customers to understand their perspectives on balancing speed, risk, and environmental stability

· Identify and analyze risks, conflicts, and impacts within and across multiple releases; work with project teams to mitigate issues

· Collaborate with cross-functional teams to maintain high-quality deployment artifacts as they move through the entire release lifecycle

· Manage, plan, and negotiate release activities while coordinating with development teams for environment readiness

· Prepare implementation plans, review with project teams and stakeholders including contact lists, communications, back-outs, and production verifications

· Gather application, component (infrastructure), and dependency data required for releases

· Execute production deployments and implementation plans during the production readiness phase

· Communicate implementation plans, release statuses, issues, and resolutions to stakeholders and leadership in a timely manner

· Lead RCA and post-implementation review meetings; gather and coordinate implementation issue resolutions and communications

· Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews

· Participate in CAB meetings to discuss release scope and/or roadblocks

· Develop and present executive-level reports, presentations, and analyses of initiatives, including roadmap and release execution

Environment Management:

· Monitor pre-production and production environments to ensure stability, performance, and availability

· Identify, troubleshoot, and resolve pre-production incidents in a timely manner to prevent production impact

· Understand and manage technical aspects of application integration, cloud resources, infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines

· Maintain documentation related to environment configurations, build and release procedures, notification lists, and dependencies

· Identify improvement opportunities in environment processes and implement automation solutions to enhance efficiency

· Coordinate with development, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure environments align with application requirements

· Responsible for handling the pre-prod deployment window and working closely with teams for process improvements

· Ensure environment readiness for all releases by validating configurations, integrations, and dependencies

· Perform release and environment management assessments; identify process improvement opportunities and ensure adherence to strategies

Continuous Improvement:

· Make improvements in methodologies used for configuration management and software development processes

· Identify efficiencies in release and environment processes; propose and implement automation solutions

· Accountable for developing process improvements and training stakeholders on release and environment management processes

Required Skills:

· 10+ years of software/SaaS experience with 5+ years in Release/Project/Program Management

· Strong technical understanding of SDLC lifecycle, application architecture, integration patterns, cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), and CI/CD tools

· 2+ years experience with Change Management and ServiceNow as a service management tool

· Proven organizational, presentation, and communication skills (written and verbal) with technical and non-technical staff at all management levels

· Strong knowledge of software development business processes, practices, and environment management

· Experience with project management, software development tools, and infrastructure monitoring platforms

· Ability to manage critical situations across teams to ensure release success with flexibility to accommodate evolving business needs

· Experience creating large-scale implementation plans, managing and coordinating them with multiple system integrations and dependencies

· Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud resource management, and infrastructure-as-code tools

· Release and/or project management experience on large IT programs supporting enterprise or government customers

· Problem-solving skills with ability to quickly identify root causes and implement solutions in pre-production environments