Release Manager/ Cloud Engineering

N-iX is a global software development service company that helps businesses across the globe create next-generation software products. Founded in 2002, we unite 2,400+ tech-savvy professionals across 40+ countries, working on impactful projects for industry leaders and Fortune 500 companies. Our expertise spans cloud, data, AI/ML, embedded software, IoT, and more, driving digital transformation across finance, manufacturing, telecom, healthcare, and other industries. Join N-iX and become part of a team where your ideas make a real impact.

Role Summary:

As a Release Management contractor, you will be a release enabler for client’s core services, coordinating cross-team release activities across environments and products. You will own the operational lifecycle of releases - from calendar planning and release readiness through execution, validation, and post-release follow-up - ensuring changes ship safely, predictably, and in compliance with client’s change-management and audit standards.

You will partner closely with Engineering, SRE, the Operations Center, Incident Command, Security, and Product to minimize release risk while improving velocity and automation, acting as a primary contact for release status, blockers, and hot-patch decisioning during your coverage window.

Responsibilities:

• Coordinate release planning and calendars for core products.
• Run end-to-end release processes and weekly patches: track builds through environments, ensuring all gates and approvals are met before promotion.
• Own and facilitate Go/No-Go processes for major releases occurring within the coverage window: prepare status, verify test results, highlight risks, and record Go/No-Go outcomes and follow-ups.
• Create and manage Release Authorizations (RA) and related artifacts to meet compliance and audit requirements.
• Partner with the DOC team to sequence and monitor deployments across regions and sites. Ensure pre-deployment checks are completed, support troubleshooting of failed deployment jobs where RM is accountable.
• Enforce change-management and business-hours policies during off-hours, including No-Fly/moratorium periods, emergency change exceptions, and adherence to defined patch and hot-patch criteria.
• Drive late-merge and hot-patch governance.
• Maintain and improve release observability: partner with Engineering/SRE to evolve RM dashboards, status views, and metrics showing release readiness, deployment progress, and risk across services and environments.
• Support post-release quality by coordinating validation evidence.
• Support root-cause and post-mortem work for release-related incidents and deployment regressions.
• Communicate clearly and proactively: provide concise release status, risk, and impact summaries to engineering leaders, incident commanders, and DOC, and ensure release email updates and stakeholder notifications are timely and accurate.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in Release Management, Program/Project Management, SRE/DevOps, or Technical Operations supporting production software releases.
• Experience managing multi-environment release pipelines (e.g., development, demo, production, regulated environments) with formal gates and approvals.
• Hands-on experience with Jira (or equivalent) for driving release epics/stories, change records, and cross-team work tracking.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and deployment tooling such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GoCD, or equivalent release automation pipelines.
• Strong understanding of SDLC and change-management controls (CAB, change types, rollback planning, audit evidence) in a SaaS or enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional stakeholders (Engineering, SRE, Security, Product) under time pressure and drive to clear decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability to summarize complex technical risk and status for non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability and willingness to work the 7:00 PM – 4:00 AM PST coverage window reliably, acting as the primary Release Management contact during those hours.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience running releases for large distributed systems or multi-product platforms.
• Experience with observability and validation tooling such as Kusto, Grafana or equivalent for data-driven Go/No-Go decisions.
• Background in or close partnership with operations/SRE teams, including exposure to incident response and post-mortem practices.
• Experience contributing to or leading release-process transformation efforts (e.g., increased automation, dashboarding and metrics).
• Comfort working with SQL/DBA partners and understanding database deployment considerations as part of coordinated releases.