Lead, Release Manager

Purpose of Job

The Lead Release Manager will collaborate and communicate with various internal and external cross‑functional teams at every level, for example, DevOps, Quality Assurance, external cloud vendors, API developers, and Project Stakeholders, to facilitate environmental requirements and code deployments on various projects. They will also be responsible for planning and managing software releases for ET&D during the full SDLC lifecycle, including post‑implementation warranty period. They will implement governance for releases by applying checkpoints, processes, and gates throughout release phases in a dynamic and fast‑paced environment. They will maintain an integrated release plan, communicate date changes accordingly and ensure that entry into the release satisfies all entry criteria requirements.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate, monitor and maintain development/testing environments across multiple teams to know what is going on where at any given point in time.
• Mitigate issues in said environments and work with vendors as necessary to permanently resolve issues.
• Recommend approaches to streamline and integrate technological processes in the organization to improve overall release management efficiencies.
• Plan, coordinate and facilitate production deployments.
• Collaborate efficiently and effectively with several stakeholders including Developers, QA, BA, Architects, DevOps Engineers, and other team members to drive releases.
• Maintain up‑to‑date documentation for tickets, deployments, environments, procedures, etc.
• Manage the release pipeline towards QA, Staging and Production deployments.
• Ensure that a release satisfies all exit criteria requirements (ensure completeness of release document).
• Track, monitor and report on environments and releases daily, weekly and monthly at various management forums as required from time to time.
• Manage risks and resolve issues related to release schedule and code quality.
• Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No‑Go reviews.
• Produce Deployment Plans and delivery runbooks.
• Release delivering to production on‑time with zero disruptions to our existing business and customers.
• Coordinate patching and maintenance activities with vendors for environments.
• Ensure that application versions are correctly deployed to the appropriate test environment for each phase of testing.
• Coordinate test data in lower environments according to testing requirements.

Qualifications

• Post‑secondary/undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related technical degree.
• Minimum 7 years’ experience in release management.
• Minimum 2 years’ experience in hands‑on experience in software development life‑cycle (SDLC).
• Minimum 2 years’ experience in ITIL framework and related support processes for incident, problem and change management.
• Sound understanding of cloud technology and can drive environment troubleshooting discussions.
• Familiar with DevOps tools and processes (Jenkins, Argo CD, etc.), Atlassian tools, including JIRA and Confluence.
• Proficient user of all Microsoft Office 365 desktop and collaboration tools (e.g., MS Teams).
• Good knowledge of Software Development Life Cycle concepts and best practices for waterfall and agile methodologies.
• Agile, Scrum Master, Business Process Improvement or Change Management Certification is a major asset.
• Knowledge of SharePoint, JIRA, Confluence, MS Office Tools, business systems, technology infrastructure, software development, data warehousing, data centres and related concepts/terminology are also assets.
• Excellent coordination and problem‑solving skills.
• Experience working in a banking or financial services environment.
• Strong oral and written communication skills.
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervisory direction.
• Strong leadership skills to manage functional teams directly and indirectly toward common solutions.