Principal Enterprise Release Manager

AT&T • Atlanta, GA

14d • $116,700 - $196,100 • Onsite

About The Position

Join AT&T and reimagine the communications and technologies that connect the world. The Chief Information Office is responsible for advancing information technology performance and delivering solutions with a focus on maximizing ROI, increasing efficiency and enhancing the experience of end users. Guided by experienced leaders, Corporate Systems seamlessly integrate with advanced Technology and Operations to drive our enterprise forward. Our Systems Reliability and Software Delivery teams are unwavering in their commitment to excellence, ensuring every solution is robust and efficient. When you step into a career with AT&T, you won’t just imagine the future-you’ll create it.

The Principal Enterprise Release Manager will define, operationalize, and scale Enterprise Release Management across AT&T Technology Services. This role will establish a consistent framework that gives leaders trusted visibility into release readiness, dependencies, risks, customer impact, and improvement opportunities across large multi-million dollar, cross functional, strategic programs, applications, and infrastructure.
As a strategic leader and transformation partner, you will work across delivery, architecture, infrastructure, reliability, security, change management, and platform teams. You will preserve program and application-team ownership of release execution while establishing the enterprise standards, governance, scorecards, and enabling capabilities needed to improve release predictability, reliability, velocity, and compliance. Beyond individual programs, you will help reduce change risk across the entire application portfolio. You will set the direction and vision for Enterprise Release Management and also build, validate, and operate the data, metrics, and tooling that support it.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in enterprise release management, program release management, technology transformation, software engineering, DevOps, IT service management, delivery governance, or a related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience designing or scaling an enterprise operating model, governance framework, or technology-management capability.
• Strong knowledge of modern Enterprise Release Management, Change Management, ITSM, SDLC governance, and production-deployment practices.
• Experience leading complex, cross-organizational transformation in a matrixed enterprise.
• Expert knowledge of Agile, SAFe, Waterfall, and Hybrid delivery models, with strong experience in DevOps and CI/CD practices.
• Hands-on experience with Jira Align, Jira Cloud, Jira Service Management, GitHub/GitHub Actions, ServiceNow, and related DevOps toolchains.
• Demonstrated ability to move between executive strategy and hands-on execution, including data analysis, metric validation, and tooling enablement.
• Strong understanding of release readiness, dependency management, risk assessment, change controls, progressive delivery, rollback planning, observability, incident analysis, and outage root-cause analysis.
• Experience defining KPIs, metric objectives, calculation methodologies, source ownership, governance processes, and executive scorecards.
• Experience establishing standardized playbooks, operating procedures, onboarding methods, governance forums, and adoption models.
• Working knowledge of AI-enabled analytics, generative AI, prompt engineering, workflow automation, and human-in-the-loop decision models.
• Experience developing executive-level dashboards, analytics, visualizations, and data-driven presentations using Power BI and related business intelligence platforms.
• Strong executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, stakeholder-management, and organizational-influence skills.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Business, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• ServiceNow certification, particularly in ITSM, Change Management, Strategic Portfolio Management, or Digital Product Release.
• SAFe, Agile, DevOps, ITIL, product-management, or program-management certification.
• Experience with enterprise adoption of Jira Align, Jira Cloud, ServiceNow, GitHub, JFrog, LeanIX, Power BI, or integrated DevOps and ITSM ecosystems.
• Experience with release-health scorecards, DORA-aligned measures, technology-risk reporting, policy-as-code, audit evidence, or compliance attestations.
• Experience designing AI-assisted risk, governance, or decision-support capabilities.
• Experience supporting application, infrastructure, cloud, database, network, security, or platform releases in complex, regulated environments.
• Experience with enterprise-scale infrastructure or OS patching programs.
• Experience managing change risk or application resiliency across a large application portfolio, including risk-based change controls and working with Change Management.
• Strong full-stack software development experience, including application architecture, front-end and back-end development, API integration, database design, and cloud-native solutions.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the Enterprise Release Management strategy, operating model, roadmap, and adoption approach across ATS.
• Operationalize and scale standardized release-management playbooks, dependency practices, readiness criteria, deployment guidance, communications, and governance.
• Lead onboarding of strategic programs through discovery, working sessions, tabletop exercises, adoption planning, and governance mobilization.
• Establish clear accountability across Enterprise Release Management, Program Release Management, delivery, application, infrastructure, and Change Management teams.
• Develop and govern an enterprise release scorecard with clear metric objectives, definitions, calculation methods, source systems, and ownership.
• Build and validate release data models, source-system mappings, metric calculations, and reporting using Jira Align, Jira Cloud, ServiceNow, and analytics platforms.
• Align delivery, release, reliability, risk, quality, and compliance measures while avoiding duplicate or competing sources of truth.
• Translate release data into leadership decisions, targeted interventions, and measurable improvement actions.
• Create enterprise visibility into release scope, schedules, readiness, dependencies, risks, change activity, and customer impact.
• Strengthen cross-program and application-to-infrastructure dependency identification, ownership, escalation, and resolution.
• Establish evidence-based readiness and risk-review practices that support consistent go/no-go decisions.
• Lead portfolio-wide change-risk and resiliency capabilities, working with partner organizations. These include application risk scoring, change-request completeness review, and risk-based oversight of changes to business-critical applications.
• Partner with Infrastructure Engineering organization to scale enterprise patching and infrastructure change across large application portfolios.
• Drive end-to-end traceability from business initiative and delivery work through source-code change, pipeline execution, change record, deployment, and production outcome.
• Partner with architecture, DevOps, ITSM, data, and platform teams to advance integration across Jira Align, Jira Cloud, GitHub/GitHub Actions, JFrog, ServiceNow, LeanIX, observability, and analytics platforms.
• Define and guide responsible AI use cases, including change validation, release-risk assessment, evidence verification, dependency analysis, intelligent scheduling, and release decision support.
• Establish human-in-the-loop controls, accountability, auditability, and measurable outcomes for AI-enabled release capabilities.
• Facilitate executive governance forums and communicate release health, strategic risks, dependencies, adoption progress, and required interventions.
• Mentor release-management professionals and foster a culture of transparency, accountability, shared ownership, and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision coverage
• 401(k) plan
• Tuition reimbursement program
• Paid Time Off and Holidays (based on date of hire, at least 23 days of vacation each year and 9 company-designated holidays)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid Caregiver Leave
• Additional sick leave beyond what state and local law require may be available but is unprotected
• Adoption Reimbursement
• Disability Benefits (short term and long term)
• Life and Accidental Death Insurance
• Supplemental benefit programs: critical illness/accident hospital indemnity/group legal
• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
• Extensive employee wellness programs
• Employee discounts up to 50% off on eligible AT&T mobility plans and accessories, AT&T internet (and fiber where available) and AT&T phone

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal