Release Manager

Role - Release Manager

Standard Title - Manager II, Release

Location: Bangalore, India

About Us

Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its innovative SaaS platform, empowering telco operators worldwide to effortlessly launch innovative digital brands or refresh existing ones, accelerating their transformation into techcos.

Today, Circles partners with leading telco operators across multiple countries and continents, including KDDI Corporation, Etisalat Group (e&), AT&T, and Telkomsel, creating blueprints for future telco and digital experiences enjoyed by millions of consumers globally.

Besides its SaaS business, Circles operates three other distinct businesses:

• Circles.Life: A wholly-owned digital lifestyle telco brand based in Singapore, Circles.Life is powered by Circles' SaaS platform and pioneering go-to-market strategies. It is the digital market leader in Singapore and has won numerous awards for marketing, customer service, and innovative product offerings beyond connectivity.
• Circles Aspire: A global provider of Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solutions. Its cloud-based Experience Cloud platform enables enterprises, service providers and developers to deliver and scale mobile, messaging, IoT, and connectivity services worldwide.
• Jetpac: Specializing in travel tech solutions, Jetpac provides seamless eSIM roaming for over 200 destinations and innovative travel lifestyle products, redefining connectivity for digital travelers. Jetpac was awarded Travel eSIM of the Year.

Circles is backed by renowned global investors, including Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia), Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund, and EDBI (the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), with a track record of backing industry challengers.

Role Description

Release Management is a horizontal function spanning across the entire company meaning you'll be able to work with multiple teams across various products and platforms to ensure their software features are reliable for the build and launch & Operational teams.

We are seeking an experienced Release Manager to oversee, coordinate, and manage the end-to-end release lifecycle of our SaaS software products. The Release Manager will be responsible for planning, scheduling, and controlling software builds, deployments, and delivery pipelines to ensure reliable, timely, and high-quality releases. This role requires strong collaboration with Product, Engineering, QA, DevOps, and Customer Success teams to enable seamless delivery of features, enhancements, and fixes across environments.

You will help the organization accelerate the SaaS journey by implementing robust release practices across the geographically distributed environment. Your contribution is required to increase the throughput of the delivery, accelerate the lead time, increase stability and provide highly reliable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish, socialize, and drive adoption of standardized release practices across the organization, ensuring alignment across cross-functional teams.
• Champion a release-first mindset by embedding release discipline as part of everyday practice and culture for all key stakeholders.
• Shift release activities left in the SDLC to ensure earlier validation, automation, and predictability, enabling seamless releases at later stages.
• Own and manage the release calendar across multiple product lines and environments.
• Define and enforce release management processes aligned with DORA/DevOps best practices (e.g., deployment frequency, change failure rate, lead time, MTTR).
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Engineering, QA, and DevOps to ensure releases meet business and technical expectations.
• Facilitate release readiness reviews and go/no-go meetings with stakeholders.
• Oversee the CI/CD pipeline to ensure automated builds, testing, and deployments are reliable and repeatable.
• Ensure change management and compliance requirements are adhered to in regulated environments.
• Track, measure, and report on release metrics (e.g., release success rate, rollback rate, deployment frequency).
• Manage risks, dependencies, and issues related to release scope, schedule, and quality.
• Drive continuous improvement of release management practices to enhance efficiency, stability, and agility.
• Act as the point of contact for production release communication and stakeholder updates.
• Keep up-to date with security and proactively identify, diagnose, and solve complex security issues
• Participate in On-Call roster to provide weekend / extended support based on business needs.

Required Skills Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Release Management, DevOps, or related roles, preferably in a SaaS environment.
• Strong understanding of SDLC, Agile/Scrum, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.
• Hands-on experience with tools such as GitLab/GitHub, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Spinnaker, Jira, ServiceNow, LaunchDarkly (Feature Flags) or equivalents.
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong organizational, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience with regulatory and compliance-driven release processes (e.g., SOX, GDPR, ISO, PCI DSS) is a plus.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities, dependencies, and deadlines effectively.

Required Core Business Skills

• Stakeholder Management – Ability to align product, engineering, QA, operations, customer success, and business teams around release goals and timelines.
  
• Risk Management & Decision-Making – Identify, assess, and communicate release risks with mitigation plans that balance speed, quality, and compliance.
• Change Management – Drive organizational readiness for releases, ensuring business functions are prepared for new features and process changes.
• Communication & Negotiation – Strong written and verbal skills to explain release impacts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, while resolving conflicts around priorities.
• Business Process Understanding – Knowledge of how SaaS releases impact billing, support, sales, marketing, compliance, and customer experience.
• Prioritization & Trade-off Analysis – Evaluate competing demands between product delivery and operational stability, and make business-aligned decisions.
• Metrics & Reporting – Define and track KPIs such as release frequency, deployment success rate, change failure rate, and lead time for change.
• Customer & Market Awareness – Understand customer commitments, SLAs, and regulatory constraints to schedule and execute releases without business disruption.
• Collaboration & Influence – Work across matrix organizations to create a shared release mindset and culture, without having direct authority.
• Strategic Thinking – Connect release practices to business outcomes such as faster time-to-market, reduced churn, and improved customer satisfaction.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to SaaS multi-tenant architecture and release practices.
• Knowledge of observability/monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Familiarity with DORA metrics and their application in SaaS release cycles.
• ITIL certification or Release & Deployment Management certification.

Data Protection and Privacy Statement

By submitting an application for this position, you, as the applicant, or your authorised representative(s), consent to Circles' Candidate Data Protection and Privacy Policy. You also agree to the collection, use, and/or disclosure of your personal data by us solely for recruitment purposes as specified in the Policy. You acknowledge that you have read and understood the Policy, are aware of your rights regarding your personal data, and accept the terms relating to international data transfers, where applicable. You further understand that you may withdraw consent at any time, which may affect our ability to consider your application. In instances where your personal data or application is submitted by a third party, it is understood that such third party has been duly authorised by you to disclose the relevant personal data and provide consent on your behalf, and that you have been made aware of this Policy.

To all recruitment agencies: Circles will only acknowledge resumes shared by recruitment agencies if selected in our preferred supplier partnership program.

Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Circles, employees or any other company location. Circles will not be held accountable for any fees related to unsolicited resumes not uploaded via our ATS.