Release Manager

Come join Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning development team behind Starfield, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Bethesda Game Studios strives to offer its employees a well-balanced home and work life by providing competitive salaries, a generous benefits program, and offices located in some of North America’s best cities.

With a goal of creating a culture as fun and diverse as our games and our players, we welcome applicants with unique skillsets, experience levels and backgrounds. If you are passionate about making a meaningful contribution to some of the most significant games in the industry we’d love to hear from you!

We will consider candidates for any of our four Bethesda Game Studios office locations: Rockville, MD; Montreal, Quebec; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX.

Responsibilities

Your Daily Life at Bethesda Game Studios

As a Release Manager, you will…

• Own the end-to-end path to live for each release or major milestone, ensuring all required work is identified, tracked, and completed relative to release or the next milestone.
• Educate internal partners on release process and requirements
• Plan, schedule, and coordinate releases across development, QA, operations, platform partners, and publishing teams.
• Maintain release calendars, deployment plans, cutover and rollback strategies, and key documentation (runbooks, timelines release artifacts)
• Serve as the technical owner of publishing and deployment work, including build readiness, environment coordination, submission timing, and release execution.
• Lead Go/No-Go decision points and ensure all technical, quality, and compliance criteria are met.
• Track and manage release dependencies, risks, and blockers—escalate issues early, resolve them ahead of release, and provide on-call support during release windows
• Coordinate certification and submission processes for publishing platforms (e.g., console, mobile, storefronts)
• Provide clear, timely status reporting on release readiness, risks, and outcomes to stakeholders and leadership.
• Maintain a release repository with procedures, dependencies, notification lists and release details
• Maintain a centralized release repository with processes, dependencies, communication lists, release details, and archived final assets, ensuring all submissions meet first-party, ratings board, and broader compliance requirements
• Develop and provide short- and long-term release reporting and metrics.
• Drive consistency, predictability, and continuous improvement in how we ship, using data, retrospectives, and feedback.
• Take on adjacent responsibilities that support healthier, more reliable releases as our tools, partners, and games evolve.

Qualifications

What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

• You have 3–7+ years of experience in release management, delivery management, DevOps, program management, or a closely related role.
• You have a minimum of 2 years’ experience guiding projects or teams through influence rather than direct authority.
• You’ve demonstrated ownership of complex, cross-team release lifecycles in a production environment.
• You have experience with multi-platform releases (PC, console, mobile, handheld) and storefront pipelines, configuration, third-party certification requirements, compliance, and submission tooling.
• You bring a strong understanding of the software development lifecycle and deployment practices and workflows.
• You’re comfortable coordinating multiple teams and stakeholders with competing priorities and multiple dependencies.
• You have a proven ability to manage risk, drive decisions, and operate effectively under time-critical release conditions.
• You excel at leveraging automation solutions and tools to streamline workflows and minimize manual effort.
• You possess excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  
  

Preferred Skills

Bonus Skills

• You have experience shipping live products or games, including post-launch support and live operations.
• You can operate as a technical authority on release readiness while partnering closely with production and live teams.
• You possess a process-oriented mindset with a focus on clarity, accountability, and repeatable execution.
• You have familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps).
• You have a high attention to detail paired with the ability to think systemically about end-to-end delivery.

Salary Range

Release Manager - The typical base pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $145,000 - $205,000 per year.

ZeniMax has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. The range above reflects the potential base pay across the U.S. for this role; the applicable base pay range will depend on what ultimately is determined to be the candidate’s primary work location. Individual base pay depends on various factors, in addition to primary work location, such as complexity and responsibility of role, job duties/requirements, and relevant experience and skills. Base pay ranges are reviewed and typically updated each year. Offers are made within the base pay range applicable at the time.

At ZeniMax certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, such as merit increases and discretionary bonuses. These awards are allocated based on individual performance and are not guaranteed. Benefits/perks listed here may vary depending on the nature of employment with ZeniMax and the country work location. U.S.-based employees have access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan and company match, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, wellbeing benefits, paid vacation time, paid sick and mental health time, and several paid holidays, among others.

This position is in a union and represented by the Communication Workers of America.

We embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything we do – from recruiting for our studios, publishing and operations to fostering safe and respectful workplaces that encourage collaboration. Our culture is based on principles of respect, inclusion, and fair treatment and we welcome anyone into our family without regard to race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.

Our diversity fuels our innovation and inspires us to create game worlds that bring us closer to the global community of players we serve.