IT Release & Quality Manager

Sunstate•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

The IT Release & Quality Manager is responsible for enabling high-quality, predictable, and scalable software releases across Agile and DevOps delivery teams. This role provides leadership over release strategy, quality governance, and continuous improvement, ensuring that frequent deployments meet defined quality standards while supporting rapid business delivery. Acting as a facilitator and advisor, this role balances speed and stability, drives consistency across teams, and embeds quality practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

Requirements

8+ years of IT delivery experience
4+ years in Project Management or Quality Management
Proven experience leading releases in Agile and CI/CD environments
Experience coordinating enterprise-scale or mission-critical releases
Deep understanding of Agile processes
Strong leadership, facilitation, and influencing skills
Ability to balance speed of delivery with quality and risk
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Strong analytical mindset with a focus on metrics and outcomes

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the enterprise release management strategy for Agile and DevOps delivery models
Coordinate complex, multi-team and multi-product releases across value streams
Align release execution with sprint and continuous delivery cadences
Manage cross-team dependencies, shared services impacts, and environment constraints
Provide executive-level visibility into release readiness, risks, and outcomes
Establish and enforce release quality standards across Agile teams
Ensure quality is embedded early in the SDLC through: Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD), Test automation standards, Non-functional requirements (performance, security, reliability)
Partner with QA, SRE, and DevOps teams to ensure: Adequate test coverage and automated validation, Production monitoring and alerting readiness, Defined rollback and recovery procedures
Lead release quality reviews and post-release retrospectives focused on defect prevention
Track and analyze quality metrics such as: Change failure rate, Escaped defects, Production incident trends
Support adoption of: Feature flags and progressive delivery, Automated testing and quality gates
Collaborate with platform teams to improve pipeline reliability and performance
Promote standardization while allowing team-level autonomy
Apply pragmatic, risk-based change enablement aligned with Agile principles
Ensure regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements are met without excessive overhead
Maintain traceability between features, changes, releases, and deployments
Guide teams on appropriate controls for low, medium, and high-risk releases
Serve as the senior point of contact for release and quality topics
Communicate clearly with: Product and EPMO leaders, Engineering and QA, Operations, security, and support teams
Provide concise reporting on release health, quality trends, and improvement opportunities
Lead go/no-go discussions and escalate risks when needed