Chief Release Manager

Chief Release Manager

The Boeing Company is seeking an accomplished Chief Release Manager for our Renton, WA or Dallas, TX locations, to orchestrate end-to-end SAP releases across complex, multi-wave enterprise programs following the SAP Activate methodology. In this pivotal role you will serve as the central hub connecting functional workstreams, technical teams, Basis operations, and business stakeholders — ensuring every release wave lands on time, within scope, and at the quality bar the business demands.

You will define and govern the release calendar, manage change & release strategies, coordinate transport management, and drive continuous improvement across the release lifecycle. Your deep understanding of SAP architecture — spanning Basis, ABAP development, and key functional modules — equips you to identify risks early, broker technical trade-offs, and keep complex dependencies from derailing program milestones.

Position Responsibilities

• Release Planning & Wave Orchestration
• Design and maintain comprehensive wave-based release roadmaps aligned with SAP Activate phases (Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize, Deploy, Run)
• Define release scope, sequencing, and cutover strategies for each wave, coordinating across value streams, work streams, business and technical streams
• Establish and enforce release gates, entry/exit criteria, and quality checkpoints across all waves
• Lead release planning ceremonies including kick-offs, milestone reviews, go/no-go calls, and post-release retrospectives.
• Manage wave-level interdependencies, critical path analysis, and schedule risk mitigation
• Environment & Transport Management
• Own the SAP system migration strategy — defining configuration and governance of transport landscape from Development, QA, Pre-Production, and Production environments
• Govern the transport management process using SAP certified migration tools (Active Control, Rev-Trac, Cloud ALM etc), ensuring all transports are tracked, tested, and promoted through the landscape in a controlled manner
• Coordinate activities including system refreshes, client copies, kernel upgrades, and patch cycles in alignment with release schedules
• Manage environment availability windows and prevent environment conflicts across concurrent workstreams
• SAP Technical Oversight
• Apply working knowledge of SAP Basis (system administration, workload management, performance tuning, authorization concepts) to facilitate technical release decisions
• Collaborate with ABAP development teams on transport packaging, code freeze enforcement, and regression risk assessment
• Evaluate technical change impact analyses and translate findings into actionable release risk decisions
• Oversee SAP system integrations, middleware touchpoints, and interface testing coordination within the release cycle
• Support solution validation activities including SIT, UAT, performance testing, and cutover rehearsals
• Stakeholder & Governance
• Serve as the single point of accountability for release status across program leadership, business owners, and SI partners
• Maintain the release register, change log, and decision log; produce executive dashboards and release status reports
• Chair the Release Advisory Board (RAB) or Change Advisory Board (CAB) cadences
• Identify, escalate, and resolve release blockers in a timely manner, broker trade-off decisions between scope, schedule, and quality
• Partner with PMO, Solution Architects, and Business Process Owners to align release content with program objectives
• Cutover & Go-Live Management
• Develop and maintain detailed cutover plans and runbooks for each wave go-live event
• Orchestrate dry-run/mock cutover rehearsals and document lessons learned for continuous improvement
• Lead hypercare planning, war-room operations, and stabilization activities in the immediate post-go-live period
• Coordinate decommissioning of legacy systems and data archival activities where applicable
• Process Improvement & Tooling
• Continuously refine release management processes, playbooks, and tooling to increase velocity and reduce risk
• Champion DevOps and automation practices (CI/CD pipelines, automated testing integration, release automation tools such as SAP Cloud ALM, Solman, or third-party orchestration platforms)
• Establish metrics and KPIs for release health: deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to restore (MTTR), and cycle time

To be considered for this position you will be required to complete an assessment as part of the selection process. Failure to complete the assessment will remove you from consideration.

Basic Qualifications (Required Skills/Experience)

• Candidates must have at least one year of experience in a leadership role (team leader, temp manager, large scale cross functional project/program management, or formal manager experience) OR have completed the Boeing internal course "Exploring Leadership."
• 10+ years of experience delivering of SAP solution development efforts including functional and technical solutions
• 3+ years orchestrating wave-based SAP releases on large-scale, global implementations (ECC, S/4HANA, or hybrid landscapes)
• Experience with SAP activate methodology
• 3+ years with change/transport tooling: SAP CTS+, SAP Solution Manager (ChaRM / Focused Build), SAP Cloud ALM, Active Control or Rev-Trac
• 5+ years in SAP release management and/or test automation
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with any of the following SAP skills; FI, SD, MM, PP, GTS, EH&S, CFIN, GPD, PS, EWM, Manhattan Associate AATP or SAP Basis
• 3+ years of experience with creating engineering release plans and releasing engineering
• Must have excellent written and verbal skills to communicate pertinent details regarding major incidents to executives, product, and technical teams
• Must be willing to travel up to 25%

Preferred Qualifications (Desired skills/experience)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical discipline
• 10+ years of experience Leading delivery of SAP solution development efforts including functional and technical solutions (SAP Solutions Manager)
• SAP Activate Methodology Certification or equivalent Agile/SAFe certification
• Experience with S/4HANA greenfield or brownfield conversion programs
• Exposure to SAP BTP, SAP Integration Suite, or SAP Datasphere in a release context
• 5+ years orchestrating wave-based SAP releases on large-scale, global implementations (ECC, S/4HANA, or hybrid landscapes)
• 5+ years with change/transport tooling: SAP CTS+, SAP Solution Manager (ChaRM / Focused Build), SAP Cloud ALM, Active Control or Rev-Trac
• Familiarity with ITSM frameworks (ITIL v4) and formal CAB/RAB governance models
• Experience with cloud-native CI/CD tooling integrated with SAP delivery pipelines (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI)
• PMP, PMI-ACP, or SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) certification.
• Prior experience in regulated industries (Aviation & Defense) with validation and compliance requirements
• Relevant SAP technology certifications (SAP Activate, SAP Solution Manager, SAP Basis, etc.)
• Experience managing complex multi-vendor and SI partner ecosystems within a formal governance model
• 3+ years experience with SAP development practices (Fiori, ABAP) : object types, transport categories, code freeze disciplines, and regression risk assessment