- Work Arrangement: Work From Home
- Work Location: Philippines
- Work Hours/Shift: *you may choose between the following shift options:
PH - Morning 6 AM | Tuesdays to Fridays
PH - Mid 5 PM | Mondays to Fridays
PH - Night 9 PM | Mondays to Fridays
- Work Type: Full time employment
We are looking for a Release Manager for a client engagement. This is a client-embedded role: the Release Manager works directly within the client team and acts as the bridge between development, QA, and stakeholders. The core responsibility is ensuring releases ship on time, with the right content, and without last-minute surprises.
The Release Manager is the person who knows what is going into a release, what is not, and why. This includes running the release calendar, coordinating cut dates, managing release branches, and keeping the pipeline from code merge to deployment clean and predictable.
Responsibilities
- Own the release cycle: planning, scheduling, coordination, execution, and retrospective.
- Work with development and QA teams to scope release content, track dependencies, and resolve blockers before they escalate into incidents.
- Manage release branches and tags in Git, including cherry-picks, rebases, hotfix branches, and merge conflict resolution across concurrent release trains.
- Drive Azure DevOps workflows: Boards (sprint planning, work item tracking), Repos (branch policies, PR gates), and Pipelines (build/release definitions, approval gates, environment promotion).
- Produce release notes that are actually useful. Not auto-generated noise, but something a stakeholder can read and understand.
- Run go/no-go meetings before each release with a clear checklist and risk assessment.
- Track and communicate release status to internal and client stakeholders.
- Identify process bottlenecks in the SDLC and drive improvements. Not just reporting them, but fixing them.
Requirements
Must have
- 3 to 5 years of experience in a release management, QA coordination, or DevOps-adjacent role.
- QA background. Has worked in testing (manual or automation), understands test cycles, defect triage, and what done actually means.
- Strong Git skills. Not just commit and push. Cherry-pick, rebase, resolve merge conflicts, manage long-running release branches, and understand the difference between a merge and a squash. Should be able to explain when to use each.
- Working knowledge of Azure DevOps: Boards, Repos, and Pipelines. Does not need to be a pipeline engineer, but should be able to read a YAML pipeline, understand what it does, and spot when something is wrong.
- Solid understanding of the SDLC. Agile/Scrum ceremonies, sprint cadence, backlog grooming, definition of ready, definition of done. Knows how software gets built and shipped.
- Communication skills. Can talk to developers about merge conflicts and to stakeholders about release risks in the same hour, and adjust language for both audiences.
Nice to have
- Exposure to CI/CD tools beyond Azure DevOps (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD). Expertise is not required.
- Familiarity with environment management and promotion strategies (dev, QA, staging, prod).
- ITIL or similar IT service management awareness (change management, incident management).
- Experience in a consulting or outstaff environment, working directly with client teams and navigating client processes.
What good looks like
- Releases ship on schedule with no unexpected content.
- Stakeholders know what is in each release before it goes out.
- Release branches are clean, conflicts are resolved quickly, and hotfixes are cherry-picked without drama.
- The client trust level goes up because the release process is transparent and predictable.
- The process is not just being executed. It is being improved quarter over quarter.
Reporting
- Reports to the engagement lead on the client side, with a dotted line to internal delivery management.
- Works closely with dev leads, QA leads, and product owners.
- Individual contributor role. No direct reports, but significant influence across teams.
