Manager, Release Management

Ingram Micro•Irvine, CA

2d•$116,000 - $197,200

About The Position

The Manager, Release Management owns the safe, predictable delivery of software into production across the Xvantage platform. This is a people-leadership role: you will manage a team of release engineers and coordinators, set the standards they work to, and be accountable for both the outcome of every production release and the development of the people who run them. The role sits at the intersection of engineering, QA, operations and the business. You will spend as much time negotiating scope, sequencing dependencies and holding a release gate closed as you will improving the mechanics of deployment. The organization is moving from scheduled, monolithic release events toward progressive, decoupled delivery — this role leads that transition.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree required.
7+ years of experience in release, deployment or change management within a large-scale enterprise software or e-commerce environment.
3+ years of direct people management, with demonstrable evidence of developing engineers and improving team capability.
Deep working knowledge of ITIL change management, including risk classification, CAB processes and audit evidence requirements.
Hands-on familiarity with CI/CD tooling and pipelines, and enough technical depth to challenge an engineering team's deployment plan.
Experience running production releases for a platform with meaningful business impact — where a failed release has commercial consequences.
Proven ability to hold a release gate closed under pressure from delivery stakeholders.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to brief executives during a live production issue.

Nice To Haves

Experience implementing progressive delivery — feature flags, canary or blue-green deployment — in an enterprise setting.
Working knowledge of ServiceNow change management and DevOps integrations.
Exposure to infrastructure-as-code and pipeline-driven deployment (Terraform, Bitbucket Pipelines, Kubernetes).
Experience operating within SOX or comparable regulatory control frameworks.
Practical use of AI tooling to reduce operational or analytical effort.
Experience managing a distributed team across multiple time zones.

Responsibilities

Manage, coach and develop a team of release engineers and coordinators, including goal setting, performance reviews and career development.
Establish primary and backup coverage for every critical release responsibility, eliminating single points of failure in the weekend release model.
Build follow-the-sun capability across regions so release execution is not dependent on a single geography.
Own the production release calendar end to end — planning, readiness assessment, go/no-go decisions, execution oversight and post-release validation.
Chair release readiness and go/no-go reviews, and hold the authority to delay or reject a release that does not meet entry criteria.
Own change management standards for the platform: change request quality, approval routing, risk classification and audit evidence.
Maintain compliance with SOX, internal audit and regulatory control requirements applicable to production change.
Drive down deployment duration and manual effort through automation, parallelization and shift-left improvements agreed with Engineering, QA and Operations.
Lead adoption of progressive delivery practices — canary, blue-green and feature flags — so that code deployment is decoupled from feature enablement.
Own root cause analysis for release-related incidents and ensure lessons learned are captured, published and acted on.
Introduce AI-assisted tooling into daily release operations where it demonstrably reduces effort or improves analysis quality.
Act as the single point of accountability for release status to engineering leadership, business stakeholders and executive sponsors.
Communicate release scope, risk and outcomes clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including during live incidents.
Coordinate cross-team dependencies — including third-party and integration dependencies — ahead of each release window.