Job Summary
Release blocker support:
- Track release-blocking defects through to resolution.
- Open a war room when needed.
- Lead triage with engineering and product to decide priority, ownership and resolution path.
- Send timely updates to leadership.
Reporting and Communication
- Weekly status reporting: Publish weekly reports covering progress, risks, blockers, defect trends and upcoming milestones.
- Leadership release-preparedness communication: Give leadership a clear view of readiness, risks, mitigations and the recommendation ahead of each release.
- Post-release completion communication: Confirm release success, summarize outcomes and any issues, and share follow-up actions with stakeholders.
Required Skills and Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in release management, program management, DevOps or a similar role.
- Experience managing releases in Agile and CI/CD environments.
- Strong understanding of the SDLC, environment management, change management and deployment processes.
- Experience with Jira, Confluence and CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab or similar), plus monitoring and logging tools such as Splunk and CloudWatch.
- Proven ability to run high-pressure war rooms and triage sessions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including executive-level reporting.
- Strong stakeholder management, negotiation and decision-making skills.
- Capable of identifying root causes, coordinating with multiple teams, and driving issue resolution across interconnected systems.
- Strong understanding of end-to-end system integrations, data flows, connectivity issues, security protocols, and interface monitoring.
- Ability to review logs, trace transactions across multiple systems, perform root cause analysis, and implement corrective actions.
- Experience collaborating with application, infrastructure, cloud, and vendor teams to resolve production incidents and integration failures.
- Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to quickly understand complex technical architectures and dependencies.
Nice to Have
- ITIL or Agile certification (SAFe, CSM, PMP).
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS) and containerized deployments.
- Background in risk management and incident or problem management.
- Any ITIL ticketing tool ( ex: service now), confluence.
Key Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities
Release Planning and Governance
- Release planning: Build and maintain release calendars, timelines, dependencies and milestones across teams.
- Scope lock and baseline: Agree the release scope with stakeholders, freeze it at the defined cutoff, and baseline it. Manage any later scope change through a controlled approval process.
- Readiness walkthrough: Run pre-release walkthroughs with engineering, QA and operations to confirm test completion, environment readiness, open defects, dependencies and sign-offs.
- Go/No-Go facilitation: Lead the Go/No-Go decision meeting. Present readiness criteria, risks and open issues, and record the decision and its rationale.
Deployment and Risk Management
- Deployment execution plan: Create and publish a detailed runbook covering sequencing, owners, timings, validation steps and communication checkpoints.
- Rollback plan: Define rollback triggers, steps, ownership and expected recovery time. Make sure the plan is reviewed and tested before release.
- Deployment bridge and command coordination: Run the deployment bridge on release day. Coordinate teams in real time, track progress against the plan, manage issues and make escalation calls.