Senior Director Release Management
IFS
As Head of Release Management, lead the modernization of release governance and enable a data-driven, platform-enabled model across Product and Technology. You will define long-term release strategy for diverse release types and embed controls into engineering workflows. You’ll drive AI-native release practices, telemetry-driven risk insights, and progressive delivery, while building a high-performing transformation team. This role blends governance, automation, and enablement to raise deployment reliability and efficiency, with a strong cross-functional impact.
Pay / Benefits- flexible and hybrid work opportunities
- inclusive workplace experiences
- global and diverse environment
- community and collaboration
- opportunity to make a positive impact
- support for innovation and personal growth
- Define and execute the release ecosystem strategy across Product and Technology
- Embed release controls into developer workflows, deployment pipelines and platform capabilities
- Establish automated, auditable and risk-based controls (policy-as-code, automated compliance checks, release risk scoring)
- Define differentiated release models for product, service, emergency, security, platform, onboarding and AI/model releases
- Lead release-led customer onboarding governance (readiness, environment validation, support readiness, post-onboarding assurance)
- Shape AI-native release management practices for AI-generated code, agentic workflows, prompts, models and knowledge assets
- Own or co-own environment strategy, shared environment governance, readiness, utilization and observability
- Build release intelligence capabilities using telemetry, operational data and AI to predict deployment risks and readiness gaps
- Drive engineering enablement for safe, reliable customer onboarding and deployments
- Lead and develop a transformation-focused release management function with investment cases and roadmaps to secure tooling and platform capabilities
- 10+ years of experience in software delivery, release management, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, cloud operations, engineering program management or engineering leadership
- Proven track record modernizing release, deployment or operational governance models across complex environments
- Strong knowledge of CI/CD, progressive delivery, feature flags, deployment automation, policy-as-code, automated compliance, observability, SRE principles and modern engineering practices
- Experience defining release approaches for planned, emergency, security, platform, service and out-of-band releases
- Experience with environment strategy, shared environment governance, test environment utilization, customer onboarding readiness, observability and ephemeral/on-demand environments
- Experience improving onboarding, production readiness, service transition or activation processes in cloud/SaaS/enterprise software
- Ability to use data, telemetry, dashboards, predictive insights or AI to improve release risk management and productivity
- Experience building investment cases and transformation proposals for tooling, automation and platform capability
- Strong stakeholder leadership across Product, Engineering, Security, Operations, Support and executives
- Proven change management capability to move teams to modern, evidence-based release practices
- Strategic transformation leader with systems thinking, data-driven decision making, security-conscious mindset and engineering enablement
- leadership
- stakeholder influence
- communication
- CI/CD
- progressive delivery
- feature flags
Reference: WJ-747_30992665