Release Management Lead

Strategic Release Planning & Execution:

• Own and manage the enterprise-wide release calendar, ensuring alignment with business priorities, regulatory deadlines, and change windows.
• Lead the planning and execution of major, minor, and emergency releases across multiple platforms and business units.
• Partner with Product Managers and Engineering Leads to plan, schedule, and coordinate major releases, patches, and hotfixes across multiple interconnected product teams.
• Require, review, and approve detailed Rollback Plans and communication strategies for every critical release, ensuring swift recovery in the event of failure.
• Lead regular coordination meetings with development, QA, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business teams to ensure release readiness, resolve scheduling conflicts and pre-empt deployment risks..
• Oversee release bridges and provide leadership during out-of-hours deployments and critical cutovers.
• Manage and lead post live release periods, ensuring issues are captured, prioritised, communicated and plans for remediation are put into place.

Governance & Compliance:

• Ensure all release activities comply with internal controls, audit requirements, and regulatory standards (e.g., SOX, PCI-DSS, GDPR, PRA/FCA).
• Maintain comprehensive release documentation, including approvals, risk assessments, rollback plans, and post-implementation reviews.
• Serve as a key point of contact for internal and external audits related to release governance.
• Enforce segregation of duties, change control policies, and traceability across the release lifecycle.

Leadership & Stakeholder Engagement:

• Act as a central point of coordination for enterprise releases, engaging senior stakeholders, business sponsors, and technology leaders.
• Chair Release Governance Boards and contribute to Change Advisory Boards (CABs).
• Provide regular reporting on release performance, risks, and compliance metrics to executive leadership.

Continuous Improvement & Tooling:

• Drive continuous improvement of release processes, automation, and tooling to support Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD practices.
• Evaluate and support the implementation of enterprise release management tools and frameworks.
• Foster a culture of accountability, quality, and operational excellence across delivery teams.

Miscellaneous

• Developing skills pertinent to role.
• Undertaking other reasonable tasks at the discretion of the Head of Section and Group.