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Job Title: Senior Release Manager
Location: India - Remote
Work Timings: 2:00 - 11:00 pm IST
Start Date: ASAP

Experience: Need 5 years minimum in Release Management and posses required certifications (ITIL, CSM, SAFe (Release Train Engineer))

Job Description: Owns the release of every product on a two-week cycle: decides what ships, runs the sprints, gives the demos, creates the governance documentation and gets each release through approval to go-live.
Required Skills/Experience:
  • 5+ years in release management for enterprise software or internal IT products, owning releases end to end rather than only coordinating them.
  • Deciding what ships: has chaired regular release decision meetings with stakeholders, BSM and development leads. Weighs business priority, effort, risk and readiness, reaches a clear decision on release scope and dates, and records it.
  • Giving demos: confident giving live demos to business and technical audiences, including:
    • POC demos to test an idea before it's committed
    • Feature demos in sprint reviews
    • Pre-testing demos, so users never see a feature for the first time in testing
  • Captures the feedback and decisions from each demo.
  • Agile delivery: has run Scrum sprints (planning, backlog refinement, review, retro) for one or more teams, on a fixed release cadence such as two-week cycles.
  • Release planning: has kept a release calendar across several products, including code-freeze and cut-off dates, CAB dates and blackout periods. Maps dependencies between products and systems so one release doesn't break another. Tracks third-party and SaaS updates (e.g. Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Salesforce) that could affect internal products, and plans around them.
  • Risk and impact assessment: rates each release's risk and business impact, and uses that to set how much testing and approval it needs.
  • Cutover planning: plans the cutover for each release, including data migration, downtime and maintenance windows, and tells users about any outage in advance.
  • Jira and JPD: confident building and maintaining boards, sprints, fix versions, filters and dashboards. Can use Jira Product Discovery for intake and prioritisation, and keeps Jira accurate so status is visible without asking.
  • ITIL change management: has worked with normal, standard and emergency changes, written change tickets, and presented at CAB. Has worked alongside an SMO or service management team (e.g. on ServiceNow).
  • Governance documentation: has personally written solution design documents (SDD), security reviews, privacy assessments (e.g. OneTrust), legal documentation and change tickets for software releases, and delivered them ahead of approval deadlines.
  • Release governance: owns the written release policy and the RACI for each stage. Applies consistent version numbers so every Production release can be traced, and makes sure the person who approves a release is not the person who deploys it.
  • Quality gates: makes sure regression testing, security or vulnerability scans and performance testing are complete before a release goes to go/no-go.
  • Release readiness and go-live:
    • Has run go/no-go meetings, deployment runbooks and rollback plans
    • Has managed a release through a rollback or hotfix
    • Has briefed the service desk and support teams before go-live, with knowledge articles and known issues, and arranged user training or communications for bigger changes
    • Has run smoke tests and checks after deployment to confirm the release works in Production before closing the change
    • Has run hypercare after go-live and handed over to support
  • Testing and UAT: has planned and carried out UAT with business users, tracked defects to closure, and knows how Dev, QA, UAT and Production environments differ.
  • Stakeholder management: can hold a release date under pressure and say no to late scope changes with a reason. Can explain technical risk in plain language.
  • Continuous improvement: runs post-release reviews and follows through on lessons learned. Tracks release health with standard delivery measures: on-time release rate, change failure rate, rollbacks, defects found after release, and lead time from request to release. Links incidents caused by a release back to it and takes part in the root cause analysis.
  • Decommissioning: plans the retirement of old products or features, including telling users and removing access.
  • Organisation and communication:
    • Runs several products' releases in parallel without losing track of dates, dependencies or approvals
    • Writes clear release notes, status reports, change tickets and meeting notes
Technical understanding (no coding required)
  • Understands CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) and how code moves from a commit to Production.
  • Familiar with Git version control and branching: release branches, hotfix branches, tagging.
  • Understands deployment approaches such as phased rollouts, feature flags and blue/green deployments, and when each fits.
  • Knows the basics of cloud hosting (Azure preferred) and how environments are configured and kept in step.
Nice to have
  • ITIL 4 Foundation, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) / Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or SAFe (Release Train Engineer / Scrum Master) certification.
  • Has released AI or automation products, or internal platforms used by many business teams.
  • Has used DORA metrics to improve a team's delivery.

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