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Title: IT Release Manager
Type: Contract (with Potential for Extension/ Conversion)
Location: REMOTE

Primary Responsibilities:
The IT Release Manager is responsible for planning, managing, and coordinating the release of software features, enhancements, and fixes into production. This role ensures smooth deployments, minimizes risk, and maintains the stability of production environments while balancing the needs of development and operational support teams. The IT Release Manager will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including development, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders, to ensure readiness and adherence to best practices.

Release Coordination & Deployment
* Oversee the end-to-end release lifecycle, from planning through deployment, ensuring all releases meet business and operational readiness requirements.
* Define and enforce release governance processes, including change management, risk assessment, and deployment planning.
* Coordinate with development teams, quality assurance, and operations to schedule, validate, and execute releases with minimal disruptions.
* Facilitate release readiness reviews, go/no-go decision meetings, and post-implementation reviews.
* Maintain and improve release calendars, ensuring alignment across teams and stakeholders.

Production Readiness & Support Coordination
* Work closely with development teams and team leaders to prepare production support and maintenance plans for new features before go-live.
* Ensure that the teams assuming ownership of support and maintenance are properly engaged, trained, and equipped to manage post-deployment stability.
* Establish clear handoff processes between development and operations, ensuring smooth transitions of ownership.
* Define incident response and rollback procedures for releases to minimize risk and downtime.

Standards, Documentation, & Best Practices
* Set expectations for best practices, documentation, and standards related to production readiness of features and applications.
* Ensure that deployment documentation, release notes, and operational runbooks are consistently created and maintained.
* Establish guidelines for monitoring and observability to ensure newly released features are measurable and traceable in production environments.
* Drive continuous improvement of release processes, leveraging automation and industry best practices to improve efficiency and reduce risk.

Collaboration & Communication
* Serve as the central point of contact for all release-related communications, ensuring alignment across development, QA, operations, and business stakeholders.
* Communicate release plans, schedules, and risk assessments to leadership and stakeholders in a clear and timely manner.
* Collaborate with IT leadership to align release strategies with overall business and IT goals.

Automation & Process Improvement
* Advocate for and support the adoption of CI/CD pipelines and release automation to streamline deployments.
* Identify and implement process improvements that enhance release velocity while maintaining system stability and security.
* Work with DevOps teams to enhance tooling and workflows related to release management, including configuration management and environment provisioning.

Required:
* Strong understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and release management best practices.
* Experience working with development, QA, operations, and infrastructure teams to coordinate releases.
* Knowledge of IT service management (ITSM), incident management, and change management processes.
* Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and version control tools (GitHub preferred).
* Excellent organizational, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
* Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to assess risks and propose mitigation strategies.
Preferred:
* Experience with cloud environments (AWS preferred).
* ITIL certification or relevant IT service management experience.
* Familiarity with observability tools (Dynatrace preferred)

Education Requirements:
* Preferred: Associate degree in Information Systems, Business Administration or equivalent work experience.
Years of Experience:
* Minimum: Experience in IT release management, software deployment, or related fields.

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