Software Release Manager

As a Release Manager, you will play a critical role in ensuring software products and enhancements are delivered reliably, efficiently, and with minimal disruption to customers and business operations. Your work directly impacts product quality, deployment success, and the organization's ability to deliver innovation at scale. By coordinating complex releases, mitigating risk, and driving continuous improvement, you help accelerate value delivery while maintaining operational excellence and compliance.

The Release Manager is responsible for leading the planning, coordination, governance, and execution of Canrig's software releases across multiple concurrent initiatives. This role serves as a central point of alignment between engineering, quality assurance, operations, product management, and customer-facing teams to ensure releases are delivered on schedule, meet quality standards, and achieve business objectives.

Success in this role is measured by predictable and successful release delivery, effective risk management, strong stakeholder alignment, and continuous improvement of release processes and deployment practices. The Release Manager enables teams to deliver software more efficiently while maintaining reliability, compliance, and customer confidence.

Release Strategy, Planning & Governance

• Own the end-to-end release calendar, roadmap, and governance framework across multiple concurrent software releases.

• Drive cross-functional alignment on release scope, milestones, dependencies, and delivery commitments to ensure predictable execution.

• Facilitate release readiness reviews and lead go/no-go decision-making by balancing business priorities, technical readiness, quality, and risk.

• Establish consistent release governance practices that improve transparency, accountability, and delivery performance.

Release Execution & Deployment Coordination

• Coordinate release activities across engineering, quality assurance, DevOps, and operations teams to ensure successful deployments.

• Manage release dependencies, deployment coordination, and production readiness activities to minimize disruption and support business objectives.

• Ensure release packages meet defined quality, testing, and operational standards before promotion through environments and into production.

• Oversee deployment execution and post-release validation, driving timely resolution of issues when they arise.

Risk, Change & Compliance Management

• Proactively identify, assess, and mitigate risks that could impact release quality, stability, customer experience, or delivery timelines.

• Lead escalation and resolution efforts for release-critical issues, ensuring stakeholders have clear visibility into risks and mitigation plans.

• Ensure releases comply with change management, audit, and documentation requirements while maintaining full traceability throughout the release lifecycle.

• Maintain accurate release records, approvals, and version-control artifacts to support operational and compliance standards.

Continuous Improvement & Release Automation

• Drive improvements to release management processes that increase deployment reliability, scalability, and delivery speed.

• Partner with engineering and DevOps teams to enhance CI/CD capabilities and reduce manual effort through automation.

• Lead release retrospectives, analyze delivery metrics, and implement corrective actions that improve future release performance.

• Champion best practices that strengthen release predictability, efficiency, and operational excellence.

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or a related field; equivalent combination of education and relevant experience will be considered.
• 5+ years of experience in Release Management, DevOps, Technical Program Management, Software Delivery, or a related technology function.
• Experience supporting software releases across multiple teams, applications, and deployment environments.
• Hands-on experience with Git-based version control and at least one CI/CD platform (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar)

Preferred

• Experience supporting enterprise SaaS, industrial software, operational technology (OT), or other highly available production environments.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Familiarity with Agile, SAFe, ITIL, DevOps, or formal change management frameworks.
• Experience with deployment automation, infrastructure-as-code, or scripting languages.
• Experience supporting emergency, hotfix, or out-of-cycle release processes.
• Relevant certifications such as ITIL, Scrum, SAFe, Agile, DevOps, PMP, or related credentials.