Release Train Engineer

Release Train Engineer

Location: Farnborough, with flexibility to work from home dependent on business demands

The Role:

We are seeking an experienced Release Train Engineer (RTE) to lead and orchestrate the execution of Programme Increments (PIs), releases, and environment governance across a complex projects.

The RTE is a servant leader and delivery enabler, responsible for ensuring that planning, execution, and release activities flow smoothly from concept through to production. This role blends PI facilitation, release management, configuration control, and delivery governance, with a strong emphasis on quality, transparency, and getting value delivered quickly.

This role requires strong technical awareness, excellent organisational capability, and the confidence to coordinate across Project Management, Engineering, Operations, and Customer stakeholders in a controlled delivery environment.

What will I be doing?

Release Train Engineer / PI Leadership

• Act as the Release Train Engineer (RTE) for the Agile Release Train, facilitating execution and continuous improvement.
• Serve as PI Master of Ceremonies, owning the preparation, facilitation, and follow up of PI Planning events.
• Work closely with Product Managers to ensure Features, Enablers, and supporting scope are correctly captured and maintained in Jira.
• Coordinate with PMs to align priorities and respond to customer needs and dependencies.
• Engage with customer stakeholders on PI priorities, scope, and sequencing.
• Own and maintain the PI agenda, authoring and coordinating slide content to guide PI sessions.
• Schedule and facilitate PI events (primarily virtual), ensuring effective participation and outcomes.
• Produce PI level reports, including outcomes from Multi RFC PI Planning, ensuring visibility of commitments and risks.
• Analyse PI trends such as scope creep and velocity, working with PMs and teams to understand causes and drive corrective actions.

Inspect & Adapt / Continuous Improvement

• Lead Inspect & Adapt, postmortems, and retrospectives.
• Author and coordinate retrospective slide packs, working with teams to capture learning.
• Schedule, record, and track Lessons Learned and improvement actions across PIs.

Release Management

• Own and manage release scope.
• Define and enforce how scope is added to, removed from, or adjusted within a release.
• Verify all stakeholders are aligned before scope is committed to a release.
• Proactively work with Engineering to clarify which release branch is the origin for each change.
• Reconcile PI commitments against release plans, ensuring alignment between planning and execution.
• Communicate and manage scope changes transparently across the ART.
• Maintain a strong delivery mindset with a clear objective to push work into production as quickly and safely as possible.
• Author customer facing scope and release documentation as required.

Environment Management

• Own the Release & Activities Environment Schedule across all environments.
• Coordinate sequencing of releases and activities to minimise contention and delivery risk.
• Ensure environment usage supports PI and release commitments.
• Work with PMs to secure time on the environments in support of newly contracted work in far future dates

Configuration & Change Governance

• Act as Configuration Manager, maintaining strict control over what is deployed into each environment.
• Ensure environments are protected from uncontrolled or unauthorised change.
• Bring changes through appropriate governance forums (e.g. TAB).
• Work closely with Engineering teams and the TIP Manager to coordinate deployments and cutovers.

Build & Branch Governance (ART Gatekeeper)

•           Own and manage internal build numbering and versioning standards.

•           Assign internal build numbers in line with agreed conventions.

•           Act as gatekeeper for all pull requests (BitBucket) into release branches, ensuring:

• Peer reviews are complete
• Static code analysis has been completed
• Items are in approved scope
• Commit messages meet standards
• Merge conflicts are resolved by Engineering
• Merge release branches back into the main branch (work with Engineers for conflict resolution)

•           Verify Jira items are in the correct workflow states prior to merge.

•           Conduct builds into environments and verify that the correct build is deployed.

Release Notes & Jira Hygiene

•           Author internal build notes (version / build notes).

•           Author customer facing release notes.

•           Ensure Jira hygiene prior to release cut:

• All issues correctly linked and in appropriate states
• All code merged into the release branch
• No outstanding review or readiness gaps
• Work with teams to resolve items still in peer review or non release ready states.

•           Ensure Jira workflows are applied consistently across the ART.

What does Leidos need from me?

Essential:

• Proven experience performing RTE like responsibilities in large scale agile environment.
• Strong working knowledge of Jira, including workflow management and reporting.
• Understanding of Git / Bitbucket workflows and pull request governance.
• Understanding of Git / Bitbucket branching strategies
• Excellent organisational skills with the ability to manage complex, multi team delivery.
• Exceptional attention to detail — work must pass review first time without obvious errors.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, comfortable engaging with engineers, PMs, and customers.
• Positive, delivery focused mindset with a bias toward flow and production delivery.

Desirable:

• Experience operating within SAFe Agile Release Trains.
• Experience in regulated or controlled delivery environments.
• Familiarity with release governance, change control, and multi environment delivery.

Familiarity (not deep hands on proficiency required) with:

o          Cloud technologies & IaC

o          Software development (Java)

o          Databases

o          Unix/Linux operational skills.

What We Offer

• A pivotal Release Train Engineer role at the heart of project execution.
• Significant influence over delivery flow, quality, and outcomes.
• Exposure to large scale, complex programmes with real customer impact.
• Competitive salary, benefits, and flexible working arrangements.

What we do for you:
At Leidos we are PASSIONATE about customer success, UNITED as a team and INSPIRED to make a difference. We offer meaningful and engaging careers, a collaborative culture, and support for your career goals, all while nurturing a healthy work-life balance.

We provide an employment package that attracts, develops and retains only the best in talent. Our reward scheme includes:

•    Contributory Pension Scheme
•    Private Medical Insurance
•    33 days Annual Leave (including public and privilege holidays)
•    Access to Flexible benefits (including life assurance, health schemes, gym memberships, annual buy and sell holidays and a cycle to work scheme)

•    Flexi-Time Working

Commitment to Diversity:

We welcome applications from every part of the community and are committed to a truly diverse and inclusive culture.  We foster a sense of belonging, welcoming all perspectives and contributions, and providing equal access to opportunities and resources for everyone.  If you have a disability or need any reasonable adjustments during the application and selection stages please let us know, and we will respond in a way that best fits your needs.

Who We Are:

Leidos UK & EUROPE – we work to make the world safer, healthier, and more efficient through technology, engineering and science.

Leidos is a growing company delivering innovative technology and solutions focused on safeguarding critical capabilities and transformation in frontline services, our work in the United Kingdom includes addressing some of the most complex problems in defence, healthcare, government, safety and security, and transportation.

What Makes Us Different:

Purpose: you can use your passion and abilities at Leidos to keep the people you care about safe. We are at the forefront of machine learning, AI, cyber security and solutions. Using your skills in the technology frontline by helping to build a safer world.  You can inspire change.

Collaboration: having flexibility to do your job is one of our core benefits, enabling you to become part of our extraordinary team.  We have been empowering our people to work flexibly for years.  Whether you work from home, the office or on customer sites, we will give you the digital tools and the flexibility to work smarter and align your needs and ours.          

People: Leidos empowers people from every background to be themselves and gives you the tools to learn new skills by enabling growth whilst developing. We believe that extraordinary people need opportunities to grow, to be inspired and to inspire others. At Leidos, we invest in technical academies, career rotations and a career development plans that enhance your future.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.