Release Program Manager

Job Description -

Enterprise Release Management:

- Accountable for creating, managing, and maintaining release processes, schedules, and environment configurations

- Collaborate with leadership and customers to understand their perspectives on balancing speed, risk, and environmental stability

- Identify and analyze risks, conflicts, and impacts within and across multiple releases; work with project teams to mitigate issues

- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to maintain high-quality deployment artifacts as they move through the entire release lifecycle

- Manage, plan, and negotiate release activities while coordinating with development teams for environment readiness

- Prepare implementation plans, review with project teams and stakeholders including contact lists, communications, back-outs, and production verifications

- Gather application, component (infrastructure), and dependency data required for releases

- Execute production deployments and implementation plans during the production readiness phase

- Communicate implementation plans, release statuses, issues, and resolutions to stakeholders and leadership in a timely manner

- Lead RCA and post-implementation review meetings; gather and coordinate implementation issue resolutions and communications

- Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews

- Participate in CAB meetings to discuss release scope and/or roadblocks

- Develop and present executive-level reports, presentations, and analyses of initiatives, including roadmap and release execution

Environment Management:

- Monitor pre-production and production environments to ensure stability, performance, and availability

- Identify, troubleshoot, and resolve pre-production incidents in a timely manner to prevent production impact

- Understand and manage technical aspects of application integration, cloud resources, infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines

- Maintain documentation related to environment configurations, build and release procedures, notification lists, and dependencies

- Identify improvement opportunities in environment processes and implement automation solutions to enhance efficiency

- Coordinate with development, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure environments align with application requirements

- Responsible for handling the pre-prod deployment window and working closely with teams for process improvements

- Ensure environment readiness for all releases by validating configurations, integrations, and dependencies

- Perform release and environment management assessments; identify process improvement opportunities and ensure adherence to strategies

Continuous Improvement:

- Make improvements in methodologies used for configuration management and software development processes

- Identify efficiencies in release and environment processes; propose and implement automation solutions

- Accountable for developing process improvements and training stakeholders on release and environment management processes

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Required Skills:

- 10+ years of software/SaaS experience with 5+ years in Release/Project/Program Management

- Strong technical understanding of SDLC lifecycle, application architecture, integration patterns, cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), and CI/CD tools

- 2+ years experience with Change Management and ServiceNow as a service management tool

- Proven organizational, presentation, and communication skills (written and verbal) with technical and non-technical staff at all management levels

- Strong knowledge of software development business processes, practices, and environment management

- Experience with project management, software development tools, and infrastructure monitoring platforms

- Ability to manage critical situations across teams to ensure release success with flexibility to accommodate evolving business needs

- Experience creating large-scale implementation plans, managing and coordinating them with multiple system integrations and dependencies

- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud resource management, and infrastructure-as-code tools

- Release and/or project management experience on large IT programs supporting enterprise or government customers

- Problem-solving skills with ability to quickly identify root causes and implement solutions in pre-production environments