Release Manager
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 role covers release strategy and scheduling, DevOps services and CI/CD automation, environment management, quality and change-control processes, disaster recovery and backup support, and coordination with technical and business stakeholders. 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
- Strong background in software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes.
- Experience with both 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.
- Experience coordinating releases across development, testing/UAT, staging, and production environments.
- Strong 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.
- For the DevOps Engineer - Advanced Professional level: bachelor's degree and 3+ years of relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- For the DevOps Engineer - Senior Professional level: bachelor's degree and 6+ years of relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- No certifications are required for either professional level.
- Must be authorized to work in the U.S.; Penn State does not sponsor or take over sponsorship of a staff employment visa.
- 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 a comprehensive 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 that streamline release management.
- Enhance automation capabilities across the CI/CD pipeline.
- Implement and maintain deployment automation tools and processes.
- Ensure full 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 environment configuration consistency and documentation.
- Coordinate environment provisioning and capacity planning.
- Monitor environment health and performance metrics.
- Establish and enforce code versioning best practices.
- 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 communication.
- 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 holidays, vacation, and sick time.
- 75% tuition discount for employees and eligible spouses and children.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
