Manager, Software Engineering & Release Management

Exostar•Herndon, VA

7h•Onsite

About The Position

We’re seeking an Engineering Manager who stays close to the code—someone who can lead a team of software engineers, take ownership of the release process for one or more product lines, and thrive in a FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC Level 2 environment where change control and audit readiness are built into the day-to-day work. In this role, you’ll lead a team of software engineers, own the full release lifecycle for one or more product lines, and partner closely with Product Management, QA, and platform teams across Exostar’s broader R&D organization. This role intentionally combines responsibilities that are often split across multiple positions. Our Engineering Managers are deeply connected to execution: running go/no-go release decisions with real technical context, confidently approving change tickets, and helping engineers resolve technical blockers—not just managing backlogs and tracking velocity. You’ll actively use AI coding tools—such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot—every day and set the expectation for your team to do the same. AI-native development isn’t optional at Exostar; its core to how we build. This role reports to the Director, R&D Engineering and operates within Exostar’s FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC Level 2 environment serving defense primes including Boeing and BAE Systems.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an engineering leadership capacity managing a team.
Demonstrated release management ownership in a regulated, multi-environment SaaS context — you have personally owned release calendars, run go/no-go calls, and signed change tickets that went to production.
Hands-on daily user of AI coding tools — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent. You use these yourself, not just advocate for them.
Comfortable in code: you conduct meaningful PR reviews, write production code when it unblocks the team, and can challenge architecture decisions with technical depth.
Deep familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, environment management, and release gating — Azure DevOps preferred.
Cloud-native engineering experience on Azure or AWS — microservices, containerization, CI/CD, IaC.
Strong written and verbal communication — you can write a crisp engineering spec, draft a clean release note, and hold your own in a cross-functional go/no-go call.
U.S. Person. We are not able to consider candidates requiring sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a FedRAMP, CMMC, HIPAA, or equivalent regulated environment — understanding of how compliance requirements land in the SDLC and in the change management process.
Direct experience with change advisory boards (CAB), separation of duties, and audit-grade release evidence — SOC 2, FedRAMP, or ISO.
Azure depth: Entra ID, managed identities, Azure DevOps pipelines and release stages, Azure Gov familiarity.
Exostar’s primary stack: C#/.NET, Angular, Python, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Terraform.
Experience operating progressive delivery patterns at scale: feature flags (LaunchDarkly, Unleash, or similar), canary, blue/green, dark launches.
IAM, PKI, credentialing, or federated identity domain experience.
Experience building or operating agentic AI workflows: MCP, multi-tool pipelines, AI-assisted code review, release-notes generation, or release-risk analysis.
Track record of driving AI tooling adoption at team scale — teach-the-trainer models, adoption measurement, coaching skeptics.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of software engineers building production features across Exostar’s identity, credentialing, and supply chain security platform.
Own the technical quality of your team’s output — architecture decisions, PR reviews, code quality, and production reliability.
Drive sprint execution: planning, backlog refinement, dependency management, and delivery against committed milestones.
Identify and resolve blockers before they become delays — escalate when needed but own the outcome.
Establish and maintain engineering metrics: deployment frequency, change failure rate, cycle time, defect escape rate.
Own the release calendar and cadence across your product line(s) -from feature freeze through production deployment, hotfix, and post-release validation.
Run release readiness reviews and go/no-go decisions: scope confirmation, test coverage, security scan results, open defect risk, rollback plan, and stakeholder sign-off.
Coordinate cross-team dependencies for releases that span engineering, QA, platform, security, and customer success — you are the single throat to choke on the release.
Drive the change management process in our FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC L2 environment: change tickets, approver routing, separation-of-duties enforcement, and audit-grade evidence capture.
Own deployment pipelines and release gates in Azure DevOps — promotion criteria, environment parity (dev/test/staging/prod/gov), automated quality gates, and manual approval points.
Manage feature flags, canary rollouts, blue/green deploys, and dark launches; default to safer release strategies whenever they’re available.
Coordinate release notes, internal stakeholder comms, and customer-facing release communications with product and marketing.
Own post-release reviews: track release health metrics (lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recover) and turn findings into durable process improvements.
Own and rehearse rollback and incident response playbooks; lead release-related incident bridges when they occur.
Use Claude Code and GitHub Copilot daily in your own workflow — not as optional productivity tools, as standard practice.
Model AI-native development for your team: code generation, agentic workflows, AI-assisted PR review, and automated testing.
Apply AI tooling to release management workflows: automated release-notes drafting, risk classification of incoming changes, regression-suite triage, and post-release retrospective synthesis.
Drive adoption across your team: coach skeptics, celebrate early adopters, measure impact, and share learnings org-wide.
Stay current on the AI tooling landscape — surface new tools and workflows to the Director when they’re worth evaluating.
Partner with product managers to translate roadmap priorities into engineering scope and a credible release plan — push back on ambiguity, not on accountability.
Participate in quarterly planning: capacity estimation, sequencing, release-window planning, and dependency identification across teams.
Maintain clear line of sight from customer commitments through sprint execution to a specific release for your team.
Surface engineering and release-window constraints to product early — don’t absorb scope silently, negotiate it explicitly.
Build and sustain a strong engineering team by hiring well, developing talent, addressing performance gaps, and making tough decisions when required.
Lead consistent 1:1 conversation that prioritize coaching, development, and long-term impact.
Build a team culture of end-to-end ownership: engineers who ship, monitor, and stand behind their systems in production — including being on the call when their change is the one going live.
Partner with the Director on career development frameworks and internal promotion pipelines.