Copado Release Lead

What You'll Do

Release Planning and Coordination

Lead end-to-end release planning across multiple Salesforce environments, including Dev, UAT, Staging, and Production.

Define and maintain release schedules, milestones, and sprint-to-release mappings in alignment with Agile/Scrum delivery cadences.

Manage all release-related work items, epics, and tasks in Jira, keeping boards, backlogs, and roadmaps accurate and up to date.

Coordinate across developers, admins, QA, architects, and business stakeholders to ensure releases are well-scoped and ready for deployment.

Manage and prioritize user story promotion queues, resolving blockers and escalating risk items proactively.

Anticipate downstream impacts of every planned release and raise questions early rather than discovering gaps at deployment time.

Sandbox Refresh Management and Planning

Own the end-to-end sandbox refresh lifecycle for all Salesforce sandboxes across the environment landscape.

Build and maintain a Sandbox Refresh Calendar in Jira, scheduling refreshes well in advance to minimize disruption to development and testing cycles.

Proactively engage all stakeholders before each refresh: confirm readiness, identify in-flight work that could be lost, and communicate blackout windows clearly.

Coordinate post-refresh activities, including data masking, configuration restoration, connected app re-authorization, and integration re-pointing.

Identify and track sandbox-specific dependencies (custom settings, named credentials, external system endpoints) and ensure they are restored consistently after every refresh.

Maintain a Sandbox Inventory in Jira, documenting each sandbox's purpose, current branch alignment, refresh frequency, and owner.

Proactively ask teams the hard questions: What are you currently building in this org? What will you lose if we refresh now? What does your testing window look like for the next sprint?

Evaluate sandbox health on a recurring basis and recommend refresh cadence adjustments as the release pipeline evolves.

Collaborate with the Copado Admin to ensure sandbox connections and pipeline configurations are re-validated after every refresh.

Team Mentorship

Lead a small team of Release Support Specialists responsible for day-to-day promotion support, sandbox coordination, and Jira hygiene.

Assign work, set priorities, and run regular team stand-ups to keep the team aligned and unblocked.

Serve as the escalation point for your team when release blockers, merge conflicts, or environment issues arise.

Change Advisory Board (CAB) Participation

Attend and actively participate in CAB meetings, representing the release team and advocating for deployment readiness.

Prepare and present CAB change requests for all production deployments, including scope, risk assessment, rollback plan, and testing evidence.

Ensure all changes submitted to CAB are documented in Jira with sufficient detail and traceability before the meeting.

Proactively raise questions in CAB when scope, timelines, or risk levels are unclear. Do not allow ambiguity to reach production.

Maintain a CAB readiness checklist in Jira and validate that every deployment meets the checklist criteria before submission.

Collaborate with the Change Manager and Compliance team to keep CAB submission templates and governance policies current.

Copado Pipeline Management

Administer and optimize Copado CI/CD pipelines (Metadata Pipeline and/or Source Format Pipeline) across all environments.

Configure and maintain Copado pipeline actions, connection behaviors, and continuous delivery settings.

Manage promotion records, deployment steps, and quality gates to enforce governance standards.

Utilize Copado's branching strategy, including feature branches, promotion branches, and org branches, to ensure clean and conflict-free promotions.

Manage back-promotions, rollbacks, and hotfix pipelines as needed.

Monitor Copado Continuous Delivery settings and troubleshoot automated deployment failures.

Quality Gates and Governance

Define and enforce quality gates at each pipeline stage, including static code analysis, Apex test runs, and automated test execution.

Ensure all promotions meet acceptance criteria before advancing to higher environments.

Review and approve user stories for production deployment in collaboration with the development and QA teams.

Monitor deployment frequency, lead time, change fail rate, and mean time to restore using Copado DevOps Analytics.

Identify bottlenecks in the release process and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

Environment and Branch Management

Maintain environment health across all Salesforce sandboxes, ensuring orgs are synchronized with their corresponding Git branches.

Oversee the Sandbox Refresh Calendar to coordinate refreshes with minimum impact on active development and QA cycles.

Manage Git repository hygiene, including branch naming conventions, merge conflict resolution, and branch cleanup post-release.

Stakeholder Communication

Serve as the primary point of contact for all release-related communications to both technical and business stakeholders.

Produce clear release notes, deployment runbooks, sandbox refresh notifications, and post-release summaries.

Facilitate release readiness reviews and go/no-go decision meetings.

Communicate release and refresh impacts, risks, and mitigation plans in plain language to non-technical audiences.

Never let a question go unasked. This role is expected to surface ambiguity, challenge assumptions, and drive clarity at every stage.

Compliance and Security

Ensure all deployments comply with organizational change management policies and audit requirements.

Collaborate with the Compliance Officer and Security Engineer to validate that permission sets, field-level security, and access controls are correctly configured before release.

Maintain accurate audit trails of all promotions, deployments, and sandbox refresh events within Copado and Jira.

Other duties as assigned.

What You'll Need

Required Experience and Skills

5+ years of Salesforce delivery experience, with at least 3 years in a Release Manager or Release Lead capacity.

3+ years of hands-on Copado experience, including pipeline configuration, promotion management, and quality gate setup.

Deep understanding of the Copado branching strategy (feature branches, promotion branches, org branches, master branch).

Proven experience with both Copado Metadata Pipeline (Classic) and/or Copado Source Format Pipeline (2nd Generation).

Strong knowledge of Salesforce Metadata API and SFDX/source format concepts.

Hands-on sandbox management experience, including planning refresh schedules, coordinating stakeholders, and managing post-refresh restoration steps.

Demonstrated experience attending or facilitating CAB (Change Advisory Board) meetings and preparing change request documentation.

Proficiency with Jira for release tracking, sandbox calendaring, sprint management, backlog grooming, and CAB readiness tracking.

Experience working within Agile/Scrum delivery frameworks, including sprint planning, backlog management, and retrospectives.

Solid understanding of Git version control fundamentals: commits, merges, conflict resolution, and pull requests.

Experience configuring and monitoring Copado DevOps Analytics (lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, MTTR).

Ability to troubleshoot failed promotions, merge conflicts, and deployment errors independently.

People leadership experience, with a track record of mentoring or managing small technical teams.

Naturally inquisitive and proactive. This person asks questions before problems happen, not after.

Preferred Skills

Copado Admin Certification (required or willingness to obtain within 90 days of start).

Salesforce Administrator Certification.

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) or equivalent Agile certification.

ITIL Foundation Certification or equivalent change management knowledge, especially as it relates to CAB processes.

Familiarity with Copado Robotic Testing (CRT / Agentia Testing) for automated quality gate integration.

Experience with Copado Agentia Pro (formerly Copado CI/CD) and AI-assisted delivery workflows.

Knowledge of CI/CD pipeline concepts beyond Copado (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins).

Experience in multi-org, multi-cloud Salesforce environments (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, etc.).

Nearshore-Specific Requirements

Based in Latin America (EST / CST Times preferred)

Able to maintain consistent daily overlap of at least 5 hours with US Eastern or Central time business hours.

Available for CAB meeting attendance (Tuesday Thursday) during US business hours on a scheduled recurring basis.

Fluent in English (written and spoken);

Experienced working in distributed, cross-cultural teams with strong asynchronous communication habits.

Comfortable in a fast-paced, high-accountability nearshore delivery model.

Tools and Technologies

Copado (Metadata Pipeline, Source Format Pipeline, Agentia Pro)

Salesforce (all major clouds)

Jira for release tracking, Sandbox Refresh Calendar, CAB readiness tracking, sprint management, and team backlog

Git (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps)

Copado DevOps Analytics / DevOps 360 for delivery metrics

Slack / Microsoft Teams for distributed team collaboration

Confluence (recommended alongside Jira for runbooks, refresh playbooks, and CAB templates)

 

Travel requirement: All roles require travel during the first 6 months of employment to attend the BHG Oars in Experience. After the initial 6 months, ongoing travel is expected at approximately ~5% annually for periodic team on-sites, team meetings, and cross-functional collaboration.

Work Authorization: This role is not eligible for employer-provided immigration sponsorship. To be considered, applicants must already possess valid U.S. work authorization that will not require sponsorship now or in the future.