Job Description
Job Title: SENIOR RELEASE MANAGER
Location: NYC, Jersey City, Wilmington
Responsibilities
- Own the release lifecycle end-to-end from planning and scheduling through deployment, validation, and post-release monitoring across.
- Drive release governance establish and enforce release readiness criteria, entry/exit gates, change management standards, and rollback procedures.
- Facilitate cross-functional coordination act as the central point of contact across Development, Testing, Infrastructure, Production Support, and Business stakeholders to align on scope, timelines, dependencies, and risk.
- Manage release calendars and cadence maintain a structured release schedule, manage competing priorities, and ensure releases are sequenced to minimize risk and maximize throughput.
- Lead Go/No-Go decisions aggregate test results, defect metrics, environment readiness, and stakeholder sign-offs to drive confident, data-backed release decisions.
- Identify and mitigate release risks proactively surface blockers, dependency conflicts, environment issues, and resource constraints; drive resolution with urgency.
- Drive continuous improvement conduct release retrospectives, track release health metrics (cycle time, rollback rate, defect leakage), and implement process improvements to increase release velocity and reliability.
- Manage escalations serve as the escalation point for release-related issues; communicate status, impact, and resolution plans to leadership with clarity and confidence.
- Partner with Test Engineering ensure automation gates, regression results, and defect metrics are integrated into the release decision framework.
- Maintain release documentation ensure release notes, deployment runbooks, configuration changes, and audit trails are complete and accessible.
Eligibility
Experience
- Minimum 10 years of hands-on Release Management experience in large-scale, mission-critical environments preferably in payments, card processing, or financial services .
- Proven track record of managing releases across distributed systems, mainframe platforms, and modern application stacks .
- Experience managing releases in environments with high transaction volumes (millions of transactions per day) and zero-downtime expectations .
Technical Knowledge
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release orchestration tools (e.g., Jenkins, Spinnaker, uDeploy, or equivalent).
- Familiarity with card authorization flows, payment networks (Visa/Mastercard), and transaction processing systems is a strong plus.
- Working knowledge of test management tools (qTest, ALM) and defect tracking systems (JIRA).
- Understanding of environment management, configuration management, and infrastructure dependencies .
Leadership & Soft Skills
- Exceptional facilitator able to drive alignment across multiple teams, resolve conflicts, and keep meetings focused and outcome-driven.
- Go-get attitude proactive, resourceful, and relentless in removing blockers and driving releases to completion.
- Strong communicator able to translate technical release details into clear, concise updates for leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
- Calm under pressure comfortable making decisions in high-stakes, time-sensitive situations (production incidents, hotfixes, emergency releases).
- Metrics-driven mindset uses data (release health, defect trends, cycle time) to drive decisions and continuous improvement.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field.
- ITIL, PMP, or SAFe certifications are a plus.
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