About the Role: We are seeking a highly skilled and detail-oriented Release Manager to own and orchestrate our end-to-end software release lifecycle. You will serve as the central coordination hub between engineering, QA, DevOps, product, and business stakeholders — ensuring that software is delivered reliably, on schedule, and with minimal risk to production environments. This role demands both deep technical fluency and exceptional organizational leadership. Key Responsibilities: Release Planning & Coordination Define, own, and continuously refine the release calendar across multiple product lines and environments Lead release planning sessions, coordinating dependencies across engineering squads, QA, infrastructure, and product teams Establish and enforce release governance processes, branching strategies, and code freeze policies Facilitate Go/No-Go decisions by aggregating readiness signals from all stakeholders Deployment & Pipeline Oversight Oversee CI/CD pipeline health, ensuring automated build, test, and deployment stages are performant and reliable Partner with DevOps/Platform engineers to design and improve deployment automation (blue/green, canary, rolling releases) Manage environment promotion flows (Dev → Staging → Production), enforcing quality gates at each stage Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to standardize environment configuration Risk Management & Incident Response Identify, document, and mitigate release risks before they reach production Own rollback and hotfix procedures; lead rapid response during release-related incidents Conduct post-release reviews and blameless post-mortems, driving actionable improvements Maintain and test disaster recovery runbooks related to deployment failures Stakeholder Communication Produce clear, timely release notes, deployment summaries, and status reports for both technical and executive audiences Act as the single point of contact for release status visibility across the organization Proactively communicate delays, risks, and scope changes with full context and mitigation plans Process Improvement & Tooling Continuously evaluate and improve release processes, reducing lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate (DORA metrics) Evaluate and implement release management tooling (e.g., Jira, Confluence, LaunchDarkly, Spinnaker, ArgoCD) Champion a DevOps culture of shared ownership, automation-first thinking, and continuous delivery Compliance & Audit Readiness Ensure releases adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements (ISO 27001, GDPR, where applicable) Maintain complete audit trails of all changes, approvals, and deployments Enforce change management policies aligned with ITIL or equivalent frameworks Required Qualifications 5+ years of experience in release management, DevOps engineering, or a closely related technical role Proven track record managing complex, multi-team software releases in fast-paced Agile/SAFe environments Deep understanding of CI/CD principles and hands-on experience with pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or equivalent) Strong familiarity with version control systems (Git), branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development), and merge management Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, or Azure) and container orchestration (Docker) Proficiency with project and issue tracking tools (Jira, Confluence) Solid understanding of QA processes, test automation integration, and quality gate design Excellent communication and facilitation skills — able to align technical and non-technical stakeholders under pressure Preferred Qualifications Experience with feature flag management Familiarity with GitOps tooling IaC (Terraform) Knowledge of ITIL change management processes and DORA metrics Relevant certifications: AWS DevOps Professional, , ITIL Foundation, SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE), or PMP Experience in regulated industries (Entertainment, Aggregation, Marketplace) Scripting proficiency in Python, Bash, or similar for release automation