Release Manager

The Pennsylvania State University • University Park, FL

1d

About The Position

Penn State University is seeking a Release Manager to join the Enterprise Customer Relationship Management Program Team. The enterprise program aims to advance engagement and service delivery for the university community, including faculty, students, staff, and alumni, through integrated solutions. The Release Manager orchestrates and streamlines software releases across development, testing, and production environments, combining DevOps expertise with project management to support reliable, efficient, and traceable deployments.

The position develops release strategy and schedules, deploys and improves DevOps services and CI/CD automation, oversees environment consistency and health, and establishes release processes and quality controls. The role also coordinates stakeholders, communicates release status and risks, supports change control, and maintains disaster recovery plans and backup monitoring and testing. Standard work hours are in the Eastern Time Zone. Production release/change windows are 5:00 a.m.–7:00 a.m. EST, and flexibility is needed for off-hours deployments and major incidents.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and at least 3 years of relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience, if filled as DevOps Engineer - Advanced Professional.
• Bachelor's degree and at least 6 years of relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience, if filled as DevOps Engineer - Senior Professional.
• Strong background in software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes.
• Experience with waterfall and agile development methodologies.
• Demonstrated experience owning end-to-end software releases through production, including coordinating complex releases across multiple technical teams, applications or workstreams, and environments.
• Understanding of ITIL practices and change management.
• Experience with project management methodologies and tools.
• Experience with production change control, including release approvals, go/no-go decisions, rollback planning, and incident response.
• Knowledge of risk assessment and mitigation strategies.
• Understanding of compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to coordinate release activities and communicate status, risks, and dependencies across technical and business stakeholders.
• Authorization to work in the U.S.; Penn State does not sponsor or assume sponsorship of staff employment visas.
• Successful completion of required background checks.

Nice To Haves

• Salesforce-specific release management experience.
• Experience with cloud platforms, including AWS and/or Azure.
• Proficiency with Azure DevOps or a comparable CI/CD and release management platform.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the release management strategy and roadmap.
• Coordinate release schedules across multiple teams and projects.
• Define release criteria, processes, and approval workflows.
• Establish and monitor service level agreements for release activities.
• Deploy and maintain enterprise DevOps services to streamline release management.
• Enhance automation capabilities across the CI/CD pipeline and implement and maintain deployment automation tools and processes.
• Ensure environment traceability throughout the release lifecycle.
• Serve as the point of contact for the purchased DevOps and backup tool.
• Maintain disaster recovery plans and support business continuity, including monitoring and testing backups.
• Oversee development, testing, staging, and production environments; maintain configuration consistency and documentation; coordinate provisioning and capacity planning; and monitor environment health and performance.
• Establish and enforce code versioning best practices and implement deployment methodologies and standards.
• Conduct release readiness assessments and make go/no-go decisions.
• Manage rollback procedures and incident response protocols.
• Facilitate release planning meetings and communications.
• Coordinate with development, QA, operations, and business teams.
• Provide release status updates to leadership and stakeholders.
• Manage change control processes and documentation.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement plans.
• Paid time off, including holidays, vacation, and sick time.
• 75% tuition discount for employees and eligible spouses and children.

What This Job Offers

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