Contract role: QA/QE Release Manager at Atlanta, GA ( Onsite - Hybrid Model) - Open for W2

QA/QE Release Manager

Atlanta, GA ( Onsite Hybrid Model)

Long Term Contract

Mandatory Skills : 10+ years in QA/QE, release management, or release engineering, including 3+ years owning release quality for multi-team or multi-domain releases.

Must-Have Skills 10+ years in QA/QE, release management, or release engineering, including 3+ years owning release quality for multi-team or multi-domain releases.

• Release cut planning: Proven experience running release calendars, cut and branch strategies, release candidate selection, and go/no-go governance.
• Feature flag management: Hands-on experience with a feature flag platform (e.g., LaunchDarkly or equivalent), including flag governance, rollout strategy, and the toggle-versus-revert model. Deployment quality: Strong understanding of CI/CD and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, staged rollout, rollback, hotfix).
• Experience defining and enforcing quality gates in pipelines (e.g., Harness, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Change management collaboration: Experience working within CAB and change control processes (e.g., ServiceNow), and partnering with TechOps, SRE, and Security.
• Strong working knowledge of SDLC, Agile/Scrum, and Definition of Done practices.
• Experience with Jira, test management and defect tools and release dashboards. Ability to define and report release quality KPIs to senior technology leadership.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills. Able to act as a go/no-go gatekeeper and drive alignment across Engineering, QE, and Operations without direct authority.
• Strong RCA and issue-prevention discipline.
• Nice-to-Have Skills Background in QSR, retail, or eCommerce environments, including POS, payments, or loyalty platforms.
• Familiarity with SOX/PCI DSS change control and audit evidence requirements.
• Experience building release tooling or automation, such as release CLIs, single-pane release dashboards, or Jira/Harness integrations.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools, and with SRE hypercare handoff practices. Knowledge of release confidence scoring, error budgeting, or DORA metrics.
• Experience with ephemeral environments and environment booking or coordination.
• Exposure to GCP and cloud-native deployment architectures. Familiarity with test automation and smoke test integration into pipelines.
• Certifications such as ISTQB, SAFe/Agile, ITIL, or equivalent.
• Expected Outcomes Within 30 days: Document the current release process, cut cadence, feature flag usage, and change management touchpoints. Identify gaps and quick wins.
• Within 90 days: Formalize pre-cut and pre-release go/no-go criteria, feature flag standards, and the production readiness checklist.
• Establish release quality metrics and reporting.
• Within 6 months: Show measurable reduction in release-related incidents and rollbacks.
• Have flag governance and change management integration operating consistently, and a single, documented release process communicated to all delivery teams.