Engineering Operations & Release Lead

Wordly.ai

2d•Remote

About The Position

Join Wordly's fast growing global team! As the Engineering Operations & Release Lead at Wordly, you will own the operational flow that takes features from “ready to release” into reliable, compliant production deployments across our applications. Your mission is to make releases predictable, low-risk, and increasingly automated, while improving visibility into delivery across Engineering. You will be technically hands-on with our delivery toolchain (e.g., GitHub, Jenkins, ArgoCD, monitoring dashboards). You will be a key partner to Product and Engineering leadership, making sure product priorities and customer commitments are reflected in realistic release plans and schedules. You will work closely with engineers, QA, and DevOps/Systems to evolve our release and change management process in a way that supports SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 expectations without unnecessary overhead. Located in Los Altos, California, Wordly is an exciting tech startup that is looking to grow its engineering and GTM teams! From virtual meetings to large, in-person conference venues, Wordly strives to provide high quality, real-time translation services in 50+ languages to anyone, anywhere. Wordly caters to numerous customers around the world which include local organizations and businesses; government entities; Fortune 500 companies; and much, much more. While this is a fully remote position, office space in Los Altos, California is available for San Francisco Bay Area residents that wish to utilize it. To learn more about Wordly visit www.wordly.ai and follow us on our LinkedIn page.

Requirements

5+ years in Engineering Operations, Release Management, DevOps, SRE, or a closely related operational role in a cloud-native software environment.
Proven experience coordinating releases across multiple teams or services, including planning, communication, and post-release follow-up.
Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD) and comfortable inspecting and managing build and deployment workflows.
Solid understanding of SDLC, environments, branching strategies, and standard quality gates (reviews, testing, smoke tests).
Experience working with structured change management (change records, approvals, release checklists) suitable for audit and compliance.
Working knowledge of cloud-native architectures (containers, microservices, Kubernetes or similar) and their impact on deployment and release risk.
Strong communication skills and ability to explain risks, timelines, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Comfortable working in a remote-first, globally distributed team.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating releases for an enterprise SaaS product with security/compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001).
Familiarity with delivery metrics (e.g., deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate) and using them for continuous improvement.
Experience refining CI/CD workflows (e.g., pipeline-as-code, release tagging/versioning strategies).
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Helm, Ansible) sufficient to collaborate with DevOps/Systems.
Experience with real-time or low-latency systems (audio/video, messaging, event-driven).
Experience facilitating or co-facilitating planning sessions, Kanban replenishment, or retrospectives.
Experience working with automated dependency and vulnerability management (e.g., Dependabot, GitHub security alerts, or similar tools).
Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) and their impact on developer productivity and code quality.

Responsibilities

Release & Change Management
Own and continuously improve Wordly’s release and change management process so that releases are predictable, auditable, and aligned with our SDLC and compliance expectations.
Planning & Scheduling
Maintain the release calendar and work with Product Managers and Engineering Managers to align releases with priorities, target dates, and customer commitments.
Delivery Operations
Participate in and, when appropriate, help facilitate planning and retrospectives with a focus on flow, release readiness, dependencies, and cross-team coordination.
Quality Gates & Smoke Tests
Ensure pre- and post-deployment smoke tests are defined and executed for each application, coordinating with QA and feature owners; where needed, perform minimal smoke checks on critical flows.
Collaboration with Systems Engineering
Partner with Systems (DevOps and QA) on CI/CD and deployment improvements, and on test strategy as it relates to releases, while respecting their ownership of tooling and detailed test design.
Compliance & Documentation
Ensure releases have the necessary change records, approvals, and test evidence to support SOC 2 and ISO 27001 expectations. Maintain clear documentation and runbooks for the release process.
Monitoring, Communication & Feedback Loop
Communicate release scope, status, and risks clearly to stakeholders. Make sure post-deployment checks are completed and feed learnings from incidents and failed releases back into the process.
Metrics & Continuous Improvement
Track and report on key release and delivery metrics and use them to propose and drive concrete improvements to our SDLC, release cadence, and engineering operations.