Salesforce Release Manager

This is a remote position.

We are looking for an experienced Salesforce Release Manager responsible for planning, coordinating, governing, and executing Salesforce releases across multiple environments. The role will work closely with Salesforce Architects, Developers, QA, Business Analysts, Product Owners, and client stakeholders to ensure that changes are delivered in a controlled, predictable, and high-quality manner.

The Release Manager will own the end-to-end Salesforce release lifecycle, including release planning, deployment coordination, environment management, validation, release readiness, production deployment, and post-release activities.

 Key Responsibilities

1.      Release Planning & Coordination

• Own the Salesforce release calendar and release lifecycle across development, QA, UAT, staging, and production environments.

• Coordinate release scope, timelines, dependencies, milestones, and deployment activities across multiple teams.

• Conduct release planning and readiness meetings with Development, QA, BA, Architecture, Product, and business stakeholders.

• Track release risks, dependencies, blockers, and critical decisions.

• Ensure appropriate release freeze and deployment windows are communicated and followed.

2.      Salesforce Deployment Management

• Coordinate Salesforce metadata deployments across environments.

• Review deployment packages and ensure all required components, dependencies, permissions, and configuration changes are included.

• Manage deployment using Salesforce DevOps Center, Salesforce CLI, Metadata API, Change Sets, or enterprise DevOps tools, depending on the project setup.

• Coordinate validation and deployment activities and resolve deployment failures in collaboration with technical teams.

• Ensure appropriate deployment sequencing and dependency management.

3.      Environment Management

 • Maintain the Salesforce environment strategy and ensure environments are appropriately aligned to development, testing, UAT, and production activities.

• Coordinate sandbox refreshes, environment readiness, and environment synchronization.

• Identify and resolve environment conflicts or configuration inconsistencies.

• Ensure development teams are working against the appropriate Salesforce environment and release branch.

4.      Release Quality & Readiness

• Establish and enforce release readiness criteria and quality gates.

• Ensure completion of appropriate unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and UAT before production deployment.

• Coordinate defect triage and ensure critical/high-severity defects are resolved or formally accepted before release.

• Verify that deployment artifacts have been validated and that rollback/backout plans are available where required.

• Coordinate production deployment readiness reviews.

5.      DevOps & CI/CD

• Establish and continuously improve Salesforce CI/CD practices.

• Work with development teams to implement source control, branching, pull requests, automated validation, and deployment pipelines.

• Manage and optimize Salesforce DevOps tools such as DevOps Center, Git, GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, Jenkins, Copado, Gearset, or similar platforms.

• Promote repeatable, automated, and traceable release processes.

• Maintain appropriate release documentation and deployment traceability. Salesforce's current DevOps Center supports shared release workflows across admins, developers, QA, and release managers, with source control and governed pipelines.

6.       Governance & Change Management

• Ensure Salesforce releases follow established change management, governance, security, and compliance processes.

• Control production deployment access and ensure appropriate approvals are obtained.

• Maintain release documentation, deployment logs, approvals, and audit trails. • Coordinate emergency/hotfix releases and ensure appropriate approvals and retrospective documentation.

• Ensure production changes are introduced through controlled deployment processes rather than ad-hoc changes wherever applicable.

7.      Cross-Functional Communication

• Act as the primary release coordinator across technical and business teams.

• Provide regular release status updates to project leadership and client stakeholders.

• Communicate release scope, risks, deployment schedules, dependencies, and readiness status.

• Coordinate war rooms or command centers during major production releases. • Ensure all stakeholders understand deployment impacts and business downtime, if any. 8. Production Deployment & Post-Release Support

• Coordinate production deployment activities and validate deployment completion.

• Ensure post-deployment smoke testing and business validation are completed. • Coordinate immediate production issue resolution and rollback activities when required.

• Track post-release defects and conduct release retrospectives.

• Identify opportunities to improve deployment reliability, quality, and cycle time.

Required Skills & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.

• 8+ years of experience in Salesforce delivery, Salesforce release management, DevOps, or application release management.

• Strong understanding of Salesforce development and configuration components, including: o Apex o Lightning Web Components (LWC) o Flows o Objects and Fields o Profiles and Permission Sets o Sharing Rules o Validation Rules o Reports and Dashboards o Integrations o Custom Metadata and other Salesforce metadata

• Strong understanding of Salesforce environments, sandbox strategy, deployment dependencies, and release lifecycle.

• Hands-on experience with Salesforce deployment tools and processes.

• Experience with Git and source-control-based development.

• Good understanding of CI/CD concepts and Agile/Scrum delivery.

• Strong knowledge of testing, defect management, release governance, and change management.

• Excellent communication, coordination, stakeholder-management, and problem-solving skills. Preferred Qualifications

• Salesforce Administrator or Platform Developer certification.

• Salesforce DevOps Center experience.

• Experience with Copado, Gearset, AutoRABIT, Flosum, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or similar tools.

• Experience managing large Salesforce implementations with multiple development teams.

• Experience with Salesforce integrations and complex enterprise releases.

• Experience with Salesforce Industries, Service Cloud and Sales Cloud

• Experience working in regulated industries such as insurance, healthcare, financial services, or nonprofit organizations.