Principal Platform & Release Governance Engineer

Risepoint

About The Position

Risepoint is an education technology company that provides world-class support and trusted expertise to more than 100 universities and colleges. We primarily work with regional universities, helping them develop and grow their high-ROI, workforce-focused online degree programs in critical areas such as nursing, teaching, business, and public service. Risepoint is dedicated to increasing access to affordable education so that more students, especially working adults, can improve their careers and meet employer and community needs. Risepoint's mission depends on our ability to deliver secure, reliable, high-quality software at increasing velocity. Engineering Enablement ensures product teams can move fast with guardrails --- not gates --- by embedding release safety, security, and operational standards directly into automated systems. The Impact You Will Make You will define what "release ready" means at Risepoint and engineer that definition into automation. This role owns the enterprise release governance model and is accountable for transforming manual approval processes into measurable, automated, risk-based controls. You will design CAB 2.0 --- a maturity-based release framework that enables qualified teams to self-approve releases using objective readiness signals embedded in CI/CD pipelines. Your success is measured by systemic change: reduced manual governance, improved deployment safety, and durable automation that scales across the engineering organization.

Requirements

8+ years designing or operating enterprise-scale CI/CD and release systems
Demonstrated experience transforming governance-heavy or approval-driven processes into automated mechanisms
Proven ability to define technical standards adopted across multiple teams
Deep expertise in policy-as-code, secure-by-default delivery systems, and automated compliance controls
Experience embedding safe deployment patterns at scale
Systems-level thinking across reliability, security, and velocity tradeoffs

Nice To Haves

Experience modernizing or replacing CAB models
Experience in federated DevOps or platform organizations
Experience building AI-assisted release readiness or incident automation workflows
Familiarity with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Helm, containerization, and observability tooling

Responsibilities

Define and formalize enterprise release readiness standards
Design and implement a maturity-based release model that enables self-service releases for qualified teams
Replace manual CAB evidence gathering with automated policy-as-code controls embedded in delivery pipelines
Establish objective eligibility thresholds for self-approval and define escalation paths for non-compliance
Ensure governance mechanisms are auditable, measurable, and aligned with business risk tolerance
Design and scale standardized CI/CD pipelines that embed: Automated security and compliance controls, Quality thresholds and testing gates, Deployment safety mechanisms (canary, progressive rollout, automated rollback), Automated release evidence collection
Encode governance standards as executable mechanisms rather than documentation or review boards
Ensure solutions scale consistently across dozens of systems without bespoke customization
Own and oversee existing CAB and release workflows during the transformation period
Systematically eliminate recurring manual approval steps through engineered solutions
Deliver a two-year roadmap that transitions legacy governance mechanisms to automated equivalents as applications sunset
Direct contractor efforts aligned to platform and governance outcomes
Drive cross-team adoption of standardized pipelines and maturity thresholds
Influence engineering, AppSec, QA, and Cloud Operations stakeholders through working software and measurable outcomes
Partner with leadership to align release standards with risk tolerance and operational resilience goals
Analyze release-related incidents and systemic failure patterns
Convert recurring release pain points into automation, guardrails, or elimination
Use telemetry and DORA metrics to guide prioritization and validate impact