IT & Software

Senior Director Release Management

IFS

London · Greater London · United Kingdom

Overview

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
Responsibilities
  • 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
Key requirements
  • 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

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