Release Mgr - SAP Platform

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee‑centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed. This is an environment unlike anything in the high‑tech world and the secret of Costco’s success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others. Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast‑paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees. Position Summary Release Managers are responsible for the release lifecycle. This includes the planning, scheduling, coordinating, and overall management of the software build process through the different stages within Costco’s delivery lifecycle. Release Managers are responsible for creating detailed integrated release plans across several products and dependencies, for improving the software build process, and for optimizing the release pipeline. Release Managers build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, team members, and peers and are responsible for communicating release expectations and statuses across value streams, program stakeholders, and impacted users. The SAP Platform Release Manager manages and orchestrates the cross‑organizational efforts required to introduce applications, infrastructure, and middleware changes into both the non‑production and production environments. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for ensuring all capabilities required to package changes for delivery to users are in place, while maintaining the integrity and availability of the existing system. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for setting and communicating release expectations across all involved teams and impacted users. *This position will be filled onsite in Issaquah, WA, Chicago, IL, or Dallas, TX. Job Duties/Essential Functions Manages, organizes, and directs work for building and maintaining software, and infrastructure releases for their promotion through a series of non‑production SAP landscapes, and leading to a production environment deployment. Manages, organizes, and directs releases that comprise of cross‑functional teams, and a multitude of interrelated and independent application and/or infrastructure changes. Manages and drives deployment risk mitigation practices (i.e., back out/contingency planning) for the duration of the release cycle to ensure an organized and successful deployment. Develops and stewards the Release Management process, along with establishing specific standards to govern the process. Creates deployment plans in Smartsheets, and ensures dependencies are identified and managed accordingly. Coordinates/consumes production releases, support packs, retro‑fits, and changes from all projects within the program landscape. Ensures strategies are developed for effectively managing change across the solution landscape and platform. Establishes and communicates release expectations, milestones, and release activity progress across all involved teams. Provides reports for and across all involved teams. Develops and maintains a release management discipline based on experience, best practices, and proven methodologies. Facilitates planning and documentation of rollback strategies, hypercare support, and handoff to production support teams. Facilitates the execution of mock and production cutovers. Conducts release readiness reviews, kick‑offs, deployment planning meetings, and Go/No‑Go meetings. Creates and owns a lessons learned document and drives change to continually improve the release process. Assures appropriate change management processes are followed for all required technical changes (e.g., patching, OSS notes) and have been applied to all appropriate environments. Coordinates with various teams to manage release scheduling for all in scope applications and maintains the master release schedule. Proactively plans system patching and application upgrades/enhancements to minimize release impact and risk. Communicates and coordinates with all stakeholders to ensure the required training and/or communication is provided to the affected user community (Service Desk, OCM, Business, IT). Documents to ensure that approved entrance/exit criteria artifacts required for production deployment are in place. Documents pre and post‑deployment issue resolution within defined SLAs. Identifies and resolves problems often anticipating issues before they occur or before they grow; develops and evaluates options and implements solutions. Partners with Project Manager(s) on development release strategy and deployment plans. Regular and reliable workplace attendance at your assigned location. Non‑Essential Functions Assists in other areas of the department as necessary. Assists in other areas of the company as necessary. Experience, Skills, Education & Licenses/Certifications Required: Excellent interpersonal and diplomatic skills as well as a positive attitude. Strong communication skills, both verbal and written. Excellent organizational and planning skills, with experience building deployment/cutover plans. Experience in negotiating timelines and deliverables with a strong sense of urgency. Strong process knowledge of System Development Life Cycles. Flexible, must be able to change priorities quickly, focus on new ones without distraction, be able to deal with conflict and work under pressure to meet deliverable dates/timelines. 24x7x365 operations – evening, weekend, and holiday work may be required. Recommended: Project Management Certification a plus. Smartsheet knowledge. Proficient in Google Workspace applications, including Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Gmail. Successful internal candidates will have spent one year or more on their current team. Other Conditions Management will review the Job Analysis for this position prior to a job offer. #J-18808-Ljbffr Elijahhouseliving