Role Description
The
Enterprise Release Manager (Production Releases)
plays a critical role in ensuring smooth, controlled, and reliable delivery of application and infrastructure changes into production environments. This position oversees end-to-end release management processes, ensuring quality, governance, and coordination across multiple teams and stakeholders. The role requires strong organizational, communication, and leadership skills to manage high-visibility enterprise releases with minimal business disruption.
Core Responsibilities
- Lead and manage the release management lifecycle, including intake processes through tools such as Jira and ServiceNow.
- Oversee release intake, conflict resolution, change deconfliction, and the creation of release packages to prevent production outages.
- Maintain a clear and auditable record of release approvals, artifacts, and timelines.
- Serve as the central coordination point between development, QA, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure release readiness and smooth deployments.
- Continuously evaluate and improve release processes to enhance efficiency, quality, and control.
Release Execution
- Coordinate closely with application teams to ensure deployment packages, rollback plans, and validation steps are prepared and approved before release execution.
- Lead release bridge calls during deployment events, managing activities, monitoring progress, tracking timelines, and driving issue triage in real time.
- Ensure deployment events follow pre-approved plans, with minimal business impact and strong incident preparedness.
- Partner with DevOps and support teams to ensure CI/CD processes are followed and aligned with enterprise release governance.
CAB Coordination
- Represent the release management function during daily CAB (Change Advisory Board) meetings, presenting release packages and addressing queries.
- Ensure that all Change Requests (CRs) are properly documented, risk-assessed, and scheduled for appropriate release windows.
- While the team does not have final approval authority, ensure CAB alignment and readiness for all production deployments.
Release Cadence
- Manage a dynamic release schedule, supporting multiple enterprise-level releases per month (e.g., three or more major releases).
- Work closely with business and marketing teams to align releases with strategic initiatives and time-sensitive campaigns.
- Maintain strong communication and planning discipline to manage overlapping releases and minimize deployment risk.
Work Schedule & Coordination Model
- Coordinate between onshore and offshore resources to ensure 24/7 coverage during release events.
- Offshore team members typically work during deployment windows (midnight Central Time) to support execution. 3 or 4 major releases in a month.
- Onshore resources lead post-deployment triage and coordination activities during business hours.
- Ensure pre-deployment activities, validations, and stakeholder communications are completed within standard working hours.
Qualifications
Required:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- 8+ years of IT experience, with at least 4+ years in release management or production operations in an enterprise-scale environment.
- Hands-on experience with Jira, ServiceNow, and CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps).
- Strong understanding of change and incident management processes (ITIL framework).
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and coordination skills.
- Ability to manage multiple concurrent releases in a complex, high-availability production environment.
Skills
Release Management,Production Management,release intake
