Release Manager

Job ID 9549

Life at Ness 

At Ness, people come first. Here, you'll be part of a vibrant team that values curiosity, innovation, and growth. We work with industry-leading clients on projects that truly make an impact while supporting every team member in carving out their unique career path. With resources for learning, certifications, and hands-on experiences, Ness offers you more than just a job it’s a place where your ideas, ambition, and well-being matter.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Release Manager to shape and drive the release strategy of a technology-led organisation that invests continuously in R&D, engineering talent and delivery velocity.

You will own the end-to-end release lifecycle across multiple products and platforms, working alongside international Agile squads to ensure that new features are deployed incrementally, safely and predictably as part of a global platform.

This is a high-visibility position combining technical fluency, process discipline and stakeholder leadership. You will partner with Engineering, QA, DevOps, TechOps, Security, Product and client-side teams, and you will play a decisive role in shortening the lead time from QA to Live, protecting live services and the customer experience, providing second-level support for escalated cases, and maturing release practices towards greater automation and transparency.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the enterprise release calendar, aligning release timelines, environment availability, and business-critical periods across squads and time zones.
• Plan and schedule all releases together with specialism leads and component owners, keeping every stakeholder informed.
• Define and maintain a component map that captures dependencies and release cycles and cadence.
• Define, document and continuously improve release strategies, policies, runbooks and templates, in line with industry-standard continuous delivery practices.
• Chair release readiness reviews and go/no-go meetings, and take part in Change Advisory Board (CAB) sessions, securing formal approvals at each key milestone.

Coordination and Delivery

• Coordinate parallel releases across geographically distributed Agile squads, managing dependencies, conflicts and competing priorities.
  
• Oversee deployments across Development, Test, UAT, Staging and Production, including cutover planning and post-release validation.
  
• Plan release schedules that minimise the impact on a global customer base, and own the release notification process, introducing improvements that enable faster releases.
  
• Act as the single point of accountability for release status, escalations and communication with stakeholders, clients and vendors, and lead hypercare after go-live.

• Identify and analyse release risks, mitigating them through phased releases planned with the squads and test and release leadership, and define rollback and contingency plans.
  
• Ensure complete release documentation, audit trails and evidence of testing and approvals, in line with ITIL practices and applicable regulatory requirements.
  
• Collaborate with QA to define release-level test strategies and verify quality gates before deployment.

• Perform in-depth analysis of support cases, including retesting in QA and interpretation of logs.
  
• Coordinate across multiple development teams to drive the timely resolution of escalated issues.
  
• Act as the coordination point between development teams and 1st-level support, ensuring clear handover and communication.

Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
  
• 5+ years of experience in release management, release or build engineering, DevOps coordination, or technical project management, including large-scale, multi-team releases.
  
• Proven experience coordinating releases across international Agile squads working in different time zones.
  
• Solid understanding of the software development lifecycle, Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe), continuous delivery and DevOps principles.
  
• Hands-on knowledge of CI/CD tooling (for example Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab CI or GitHub Actions) and of Git-based source control workflows.
  
• Experience with ITIL-based change, release and incident management, including second-level support and log analysis, and with ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow.
  
• Proficiency with Jira and Confluence for planning, tracking and documentation.
  
• Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure or GCP) and an understanding of containerised deployments.
  
• Excellent stakeholder management, negotiation and communication skills, at both technical and senior business levels.
  
• Fluent written and spoken English.

Other Key Competencies

• Strategic, structured thinking with strong attention to detail.
  
• Ownership mindset and composure under pressure.
  
• Strong analytical and risk-assessment capabilities.
  
• Customer-centric approach, with a focus on minimising customer impact.
  
• Collaborative leadership and the ability to influence without direct authority.
  
• Commitment to continuous improvement, automation and self-development