Release Manager

Release Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and communicate a centralized release calendar covering application, platform, and infrastructure releases, ensuring alignment with business events and regulatory timelines.
• Govern, plan, schedule, and control software builds and infrastructure changes for Change Requests (CRs) or projects across all environments and stages.
• Manage release activities across
• Development (Dev), System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Production, and Disaster Recovery (DR)
• environments.
• Lead release governance forums including Release Meetings and ACAB (Advisory Change Approval Board) meetings, engaging stakeholders and technical teams.
• Plan and schedule releases by coordinating with cross-functional stakeholders including Engineering, DevOps, QA, Infrastructure, and Business teams.
• Facilitate release readiness reviews, go/no-go decision meetings, and post-release reviews; ensure actions, decisions, and lessons learned are documented and tracked.
• Ensure deployed releases meet customer expectations and service quality standards.
• Identify, assess, and manage release risks, issues, and change impacts; define mitigation plans, rollback strategies, and communication protocols.
• Coordinate post-implementation review (PIR) activities and oversee fixes for issues identified during post-release validation and sanity checks.
• Ensure all changes comply with the organization’s change management process and governance controls.
• Collaborate with DevOps and Engineering teams to enhance CI/CD pipelines, automate deployments, and standardize release artifacts, documentation, and checklists.
• Define, monitor, and report on release KPIs such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR); drive continuous improvement initiatives.
• Support internal and external audits, compliance checks, and regulatory reviews related to change and release management.

Qualifications & Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• Proven experience in Release Management, Change Management, or similar roles.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and release processes.
• Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps).
• Familiarity with ITIL processes, especially Change and Release Management.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Strong organizational, planning, and risk management abilities.
• Ability to manage multiple releases and priorities in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL Certification (v3/v4).
• Experience in regulated industries (e.g., banking, telecom, healthcare).
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure releases.