Senior Director Release Management
Job Description
We are looking for a strategic and transformation-focused Head of Release Management to modernize the release ecosystem across Product and Technology. This role will lead the shift from manual, process-heavy release governance to a modern, data-driven and platform-enabled model where release safety, compliance and operational readiness are embedded directly into engineering workflows, deployment pipelines and platform capabilities.
The successful candidate will define the long-term release strategy across multiple release types, including planned product releases, service updates, emergency and security releases, platform releases, customer onboarding releases and future AI/model releases. They will establish risk-based guardrails, policy-as-code, automated compliance checks, release risk scoring, automated evidence collection and progressive deployment controls to reduce reliance on manual approvals and governance forums.
This role will also shape environment strategy, release intelligence and engineering enablement across Product and Technology. Working closely with Platform Engineering, DevOps, Security, Product, Quality, Cloud Operations and engineering leadership, the Head of Release Management will drive the adoption of automated readiness checks, environment observability, telemetry-led insights, predictive risk management and modern deployment practices.
A key part of the role is building a release management capability that acts as an enablement and transformation function rather than a coordination gate. The role will lead, coach and develop the team, create investment cases and transformation roadmaps, and promote a culture of evidence-based decision making, shared ownership, progressive delivery and continuous improvement.
Key responsibilities include:
• Define and execute the release ecosystem strategy across Product and Technology.
• Embed release controls into developer workflows, deployment pipelines and platform capabilities.
• Establish automated, auditable and risk-based controls, including policy-as-code, automated compliance checks and release risk scoring.
• Define differentiated release models for product, service, emergency, security, platform, customer onboarding and AI/model releases.
• Lead release-led customer onboarding governance, including readiness, environment validation, support readiness and post-onboarding assurance.
• Shape AI-native release management practices for AI-generated code, agentic workflows, prompts, models and knowledge assets.
• Own or co-own environment strategy, shared environment governance, readiness, utilization and observability.
• Build release intelligence capabilities using telemetry, operational data and AI to predict deployment risks and readiness gaps.
• Drive engineering enablement by helping teams deploy and onboard customers safely, reliably and independently.
• Lead and develop a release management function focused on transformation, automation and continuous improvement.
• Build investment cases and transformation roadmaps to secure the tooling, automation, telemetry and platform capabilities required to modernize release management.
Requirements
Department: Research and Development
Function: Information Technology
Experience Level: Director