Release & Testing Manager

Job Description

Horizon Media, founded in 1989 by Bill Koenigsberg, is recognized as one of the most innovative marketing and advertising firms. We are headquartered in New York City, with offices in Los Angeles and Toronto. A leader in driving business solutions for marketers, Horizon is known for its highly personal approach to client service. Renowned for its incredible culture, Horizon is consistently named to all the prestigious annual Best Places to Work lists published by Fortune, AdAge, Crain's New York Business and Los Angeles Business Journal. Together we are building a place of belonging.

At Horizon, we understand the value that different perspectives can bring to our clients and culture, so we strive for an environment where our employees feel welcomed, safe and empowered. We value YOU and believe that your authentic voice and unique perspective allows us to create a more rewarding culture, and experience, together.

Our simple recipe for success? We hire talented people (thinkers, doers, dreamers, makers), challenge them and give them every opportunity to grow.

As Release & Testing Manager at Horizon Media, you will lead the release and user acceptance testing of Blu, Horizon's enterprise engine for strategic growth, ensuring every data update delivers clear value to end users. In this pivotal role, you will oversee release processes, manage testing and UAT, and drive the decisions that keep product delivery seamless and impactful. You will be part of a nimble product team, working alongside passionate team members committed to innovation, collaboration, and building enterprise-grade products for our end users. Because Blu is an AI-native platform, you will test and release capabilities whose outputs are probabilistic rather than fixed, making judgment about model and data changes as important as process discipline. The ideal candidate has a strong background in big data, marketing technology, and addressable marketing, with deep experience in the software development lifecycle, change management, and CI/CD.

Your primary focus will be Horizon's flagship product, the Blu Platform: an AI-native, open, and composable platform that compounds marketing intelligence for our internal teams and clients. With capabilities like privacy-compliant identity resolution and predictive analytics, Blu enables brands to optimize campaigns and connect with consumers more effectively.

In this role, you will serve as the central point of communication for release-related issues and release-impacting incidents, partnering with Product Marketing on user-facing release messaging and with the platform support team on the issues affecting users. You will play a key role in building confidence in our data products and supporting users with clarity and consistency.

Release Management:

• Lead end-to-end release processes for the Blu Platform, including hotfixes and regular updates.
• Own release readiness, maintaining the production readiness tracker and running go/no-go decisions, confirming every workstream has met its testing and acceptance criteria before anything moves to production.
• Evaluate the impact of issues on internal users and clients, providing clear, actionable guidance and workarounds when necessary.
• Partner with the platform support team to identify the issues causing the greatest user impact, prioritize those fixes into upcoming releases, and document those resolutions explicitly in release notes so users can see that reported problems have been addressed.
• Partner with Product Marketing to plan and deliver release communications, including release notes, feature announcements, and user-facing guidance, so internal users and clients learn about changes before they encounter them.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data operations, product marketing, and client service teams to ensure consistent and timely communication around platform bugs and resolutions.
• Serve as a horizontal liaison between technical teams and business stakeholders, translating complex issues into clear, contextualized updates.
• Provide the release status and readiness inputs that feed leadership roadmap reporting and the monthly executive summary.

Release Communication & Risk:

• Build scalable communication frameworks for release-impacting incidents, covering notification, status updates, and resolution messaging, in partnership with the platform support team, who lead ticket triage and escalation.
• Lead continuous improvement of release and incident communication processes, ensuring end users are informed with clarity and speed.

Testing & User Acceptance Testing:

Manage end-to-end testing across every product and data workstream, including first-party data (1PD), third-party data (3PD), and platform features, covering both internal testing within the product organization and user acceptance testing with Business Solutions and other client-facing teams.

• Plan & Coordinate: Develop test plans, schedules, and resource needs with input from stakeholders, and act as the central point of contact for all testing activities across product, QA, development, and business-facing teams.
• Internal Product Testing: Coordinate test passes inside the product organization across product, QA, engineering, and data, validating functionality and data accuracy before anything reaches business users.
• Business & Client-Facing UAT: Conduct acceptance testing with Business Solutions and other client-facing teams, ensuring the people who use the platform with clients validate real-world workflows before release.
• Vendor Test Cycles: Lead the recurring two-week testing cycles with our development partner, setting cycle scope, tracking execution, driving defects to closure, and reporting cycle outcomes.
• Execute & Monitor: Review test cases, ensure test data readiness, and track execution, overseeing defect logging and resolution and escalating issues as needed.
• Report & Recommend: Maintain a single UAT and production readiness view across all workstreams, and deliver clear summaries of test outcomes, quality metrics, and improvement recommendations.

• 5+ years in product or release management, with experience in AI-driven or data-intensive SaaS environments.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, Data Science, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of SDLC, QA practices, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven track record of managing enterprise platforms through multiple release cycles.
• Experience releasing or testing AI- or model-driven features is preferred, including validating non-deterministic outputs, managing model and data version changes, and defining evaluation criteria where simple pass/fail test cases do not apply.
• Experience coordinating testing with external development partners or vendors, including cycle planning, defect management, and cycle reporting.
• Experience partnering with product marketing on release communications and user-facing change management.
• Proficient with technology tools such as Monday.com, Jira, Snowflake, AWS, and DBT for project management and data analysis.
• Adept at problem-solving and troubleshooting complex software and data issues, with the ability to analyze data and technical detail to improve testing practices and product quality.
• Flexible and adaptable, capable of adjusting to new challenges in a dynamic work environment.
• Effective communicator with the ability to translate technical concepts clearly across teams and stakeholders.

Horizon Media is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.  We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

Salary Range

A successful applicant’s actual base salary may vary based on factors such as individual’s skill sets, experience, training, education,  licensure/certifications, and qualifications for the role.  As an organization, we take an aptitude and competency-based hiring approach.  We provide a competitive total rewards package including a discretionary bonus and a variety of benefits including health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance, retirement savings plans, company paid holidays and unlimited paid time off (PTO), mental health and wellness resources, pet insurance, childcare resources, identity theft insurance, fertility assistance programs, and fitness reimbursement.