CI/CD & Release Automation Lead
Willis Towers Watson
In this role you will lead the evolution of our release management practice for a SaaS-oriented delivery model. You’ll collaborate with product, engineering and security to plan, govern and automate releases that align with governance and security requirements. You’ll drive CI/CD adoption, implement automated release workflows, and promote progressive delivery and feature flag strategies. Your work will improve delivery speed, reliability, and collaboration across cross‑functional teams. This is a chance to shape modern release processes in a growth‑oriented organization.
Responsibilities- Establish and manage modern release practices with quality gates, automated checks and release readiness criteria
- Coordinate release governance, risk, dependencies and decisions across multiple product teams
- Drive CI/CD adoption and release orchestration across teams
- Embed release processes into delivery workflows (pipelines, GitOps, environment promotion) and reduce manual activities
- Promote progressive delivery techniques (feature flags, canary, blue/green) where applicable
- Collaborate with platform, engineering and governance to standardise release patterns across SaaS products
- Define and track DORA-style metrics and drive data‑led continuous improvement
- Coach teams on DevOps practices and automation to shift to flow-based delivery
- Act as liaison between engineering, architecture and governance to ensure integrated release planning
- 3+ years of release management experience in a SaaS organisation with frequent updates to customers
- Strong experience in Agile, SDLC and DevOps practices
- Experience with modern release tooling (ServiceNow, BMC)
- Stakeholder management across internal customers and cross-functional teams
- Contributions to wider organisational practice improvement and evolution
- Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) and release automation
- Experience implementing pipeline-based release controls, automated testing, and deployment strategies
- Understanding of infrastructure as code (OpenTofu) and environment management
- Experience with cloud-native SaaS architectures (preferably Azure)
- Familiarity with observability and release health metrics
- Hands-on ability to diagnose and improve delivery pipelines
- Understanding of GitOps, trunk-based development and progressive delivery
- Experience reducing delivery friction through automation
- stakeholder management
- collaboration
- data-driven mindset
- CI/CD
- Release automation
- GitOps
Reference: WJ-747_30219779