IaaS Release Engineer

Red River•College Park, MD

About The Position

This IaaS Release Engineer role requires a background in Software Engineering combined with team leadership skills and a diligence in process definition and improvement. They will be responsible for the lifecycle of the development, review, delivery, and improvement of critical infrastructure. This includes aspects such as hypervisor images, bare-metal firmware, and network marketecture and configuration. As a team leader, identifying where to and how to implement automation will be a key enabler of our success. This role will support the larger Integrated Combat System (ICS) and lay out and manage the IaaS key DevSecOps and Continuous Integration / Contrinous Deliver (CI/CD) processes working hand in hand with the NSWC DD Government Technical Direction Agent (TDA). This role will be held accountable for the ability to deliver quality on schedule, a key aspect of which will be forecasting, and collaborative tailoring releases to meet aggressive but realistic goals. As such experience with PI Planning and Risk management will be beneficial experience to have.

Requirements

10+ years in Release Management, Technical Program Management, or Software Delivery, with 3+ years leading teams in a multi-product software organization.
Proven experience building or scaling a release management function across multiple technology domains (cloud, mobile, embedded, firmware).
Track record managing and developing teams, including coaching, performance management, and career development.
Strong expertise in release governance, readiness frameworks, Go/No-Go decision-making, and risk/escalation management across complex delivery environments.
Working knowledge of CI/CD, DevSecOps, and/or DevOps pipelines, deployment orchestration, and modern release automation practices.
Experience defining release health metrics, KPIs, and dashboards that drive decision quality and operational visibility.
Proven ability to drive aligned execution across cross-functional boundaries.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field or equivalent practical experience.
U.S. Citizenship Required

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting on-premise and offline self-hosted clouds.
Track record improving CI/CD, DevSecOps, and/or DevOps maturity, deployment automation, and release tooling at scale.
Proficiency with Jira, Azure, Confluence, and GitLab.
Experience with Cyber and System Security.
Working knowledge of incident management, change control, and operational compliance in production environments.
Familiarity with AI-assisted release practices (automated change impact analysis, intelligent deployment gating, predictive risk scoring).
Agile, SAFe, PMP, or Lean Six Sigma certifications are a plus.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership: Build the technical culture, habits, and processes of the team! Lead, coach, and develop a team of multiple engineering groups. Working with the PM, help drive clarity in roles and responsibilities for teams, groups, and individuals. Create a healthy and robust operating rhythm to ensure consistent execution across the IaaS pipeline. Set high standards and drive all to achieve them through positive collaboration. Interface with Government and other stakeholders in a professional and collaborative way increasing trust and transparency in information and communications. Create a shared release operating cadence that brings clarity to priorities, risks, dependencies, and readiness across teams.
Build Definition, Scope Control, and Pipeline Management: Define, implement, and maintain build and packaging pipelines for bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure components. Standardize the creation of hypervisor installation images (e.g. VMware ESXi, KVM/QEMU) through automated tooling like HashiCorp Packer. Maintain version-controlled build definitions, ensuring reproducible builds across development, staging, and production environments. Create a shared release operating cadence that brings clarity to priorities, risks, dependencies, and readiness across teams. Define release readiness criteria, checkpoints, approval workflows, and standard artifacts that improve consistency and auditability
Artifact & Configuration Management: Manage the artifact repository lifecycle (e.g., JFrog Artifactory, Azure, Nexus, GIT) for infrastructure deliverables, including OS images, firmware packages, and custom drivers. Establish and enforce semantic versioning and metadata tagging standards for all infrastructure artifacts. Oversee the distribution and delivery of golden images, firmware updates, and validated configuration baselines to globally distributed data centers. Maintain and deliver version-controlled network configuration files, templates, and structured variables (YAML/JSON) for physical and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) environments. Ensure network change artifacts are validated for syntax, schema compliance, and security policy adherence prior to push-button deployment.
Change Management & Release Coordination: Act as a key liaison to the Government Stakeholders Configuration Control Board (CCB), coordinating complex infrastructure releases and maintenance windows. Develop detailed roll-out, verification, and roll-back procedures for high-risk infrastructure changes (e.g., hypervisor upgrades, network switch configuration deployments). Lead the team in maintaining comprehensive documentation of release manifests, change logs, and system dependency maps. Oversee release calendars, milestone planning, dependency tracking, and integrated schedules across cloud, mobile, embedded, and firmware delivery streams. Ensure release plans include quality validation, environment readiness, launch coordination, rollback strategies, and support preparedness, ensuring releases are ready operationally. Support release planning by aligning timing, sequencing, capacity, and organizational interdependencies.
Lifecycle Management and Data Driven Continuous Improvement: Lead post-release reviews, retrospectives, and root cause analysis; use data, trends, and team feedback to strengthen planning, governance, and execution every cycle. Coordinate the testing, packaging, and validation of hardware-level updates, including BIOS/UEFI, Baseboard Management Controllers (CIMC/BMC/IPMI), RAID controllers, and Network Interface Cards (NICs). Identify, assess, and manage release risks, issues, opportunities, dependencies, and operational constraints across a complex portfolio. Drive proactive mitigation planning throughout the release lifecycle, promoting Risks and Opportunities to leadership alongside plans to address them. Define and operationalize release health metrics, KPIs, and dashboards that provide meaningful visibility into release performance. Help teams navigate technical and resource trade-offs quickly while protecting customer experience, business commitments, and platform stability. Support and improve executive reporting with clear status, actionable risk views, and trend-based insights that support better planning and decision-making.
Cybersecurity & Hardening: Work with the Cyber and System Security team to ensure best practices and processes are documented and implemented. Ensure Cyber team integrates security scanning tools (e.g., vulnerability scanners, compliance-as-code tools like OpenSCAP or InSpec) directly into the artifact build pipelines. Ensure all delivered hypervisor and OS images comply with security baselines (e.g., CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs). Manage the lifecycle of cryptographic signing keys, certificates, and secrets used to sign and secure infrastructure build artifacts.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Automation: Support the Configuration Item (CI) Leads and engineering teams in packaging, versioning, and testing IaC modules (e.g., Terraform modules, Ansible collections, OpenTofu, Pulumi blueprints). Integrate automated testing frameworks (e.g., Terratest, Kitchen-CI, Ansible-lint) into the release pipeline to validate configurations before deployment. Ensure IaC release processes align with GitOps workflows and state file management best practices. Build automated processes to deploy validated firmware baselines across heterogeneous server fleets.