Release Manager

Bellota Labs • Redwood City, CA

27d • $100,000 - $140,000

About The Position

At Bellota Labs , we are building the next generation of real money and social poker experiences for the US market. As we scale ClubWPT Gold and new products, the complexity of our releases and live operations is growing fast. We are looking for a Release Manager to own how we ship product and how we respond when things break. Pod producers will continue to own feature plans and roadmaps, and engineering will own delivery and fixes. Your job is to run the loop around both: keep releases on a predictable cadence, keep incidents structured, and turn all of that activity into clear, reusable process. If you like clean checklists, clear timelines, and helping teams keep their own agreements, this role is for you.

Requirements

• 2-4 years of experience in release management, technical project management, SRE / DevOps coordination, or a similar role supporting software teams
• Proven experience running recurring operational ceremonies and keeping them on track
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail across multiple teams and time zones
• Comfortable nudging senior leaders and engineers with clear, factual reminders of what was agreed and by when
• Clear written communication in Slack, Confluence, and JIRA, especially under time pressure
• Familiarity with JIRA and Confluence, and experience working closely with engineering and QA teams

Nice To Haves

• Experience in online games, fintech, or other high availability, customer facing products
• Exposure to incident management practices, including post incident reviews and runbooks
• Experience working with distributed teams spanning US and APAC

Responsibilities

• Own the release cadence
• Run the core release ceremonies: code freeze standups, go or no go, launch war rooms, and post release reviews
• Keep release pages, calendars, and status in Confluence and JIRA current and easy to consume
• Manage code freeze and scope changes
• Track work targeting each release and flag scope risk early
• Log code freeze breaks and other exceptions, including ticket, rationale, and approver
• Help product and engineering leads see and discuss the tradeoffs they are making
• Act as producer for release week
• Coordinate with pod producers, QA, and engineering so they show up with the right inputs at the right time
• Capture decisions, risks, and follow ups from release meetings and war rooms
• Make sure nothing falls between pods during the final stretch
• Lead the product incident process
• Triage new P0 and P1 issues in the incident channel, clarify severity and impact, and name an incident lead
• Keep a short timeline and regular updates while the incident is active
• Schedule and run brief post incident reviews, and track follow up work in JIRA
• Surface patterns and improve the system
• Use release logs, freeze breaks, incidents, and postmortems to highlight recurring themes
• Propose simple changes to checklists, guardrails, and communication that reduce repeat issues over time

Benefits

• Own a critical function
• Take the lead on how we ship and operate, not just a single feature or pod.
• See your impact quickly
• The systems you put in place will show up immediately in how the team experiences releases and incidents.
• Work with a small, senior team
• Partner directly with product, engineering, and operations leadership on the core heartbeat of the business.
• Grow with the company
• As we add products and pods, there is room for this function to evolve into a broader delivery or programs organization.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed