Senior Manager - Release Engineering

CVS Health•Woonsocket, RI

2d•$130,295 - $260,590

About The Position

CVS Health is seeking an experienced, strategic leader to oversee Release Engineering for Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness. The team is responsible for the safety, consistency, and recoverability of application, platform, infrastructure, and edge changes across the company’s pharmacy, retail, and digital technology ecosystem, including approximately 9,000 stores, centralized platforms, and edge and dispensing systems. Release Engineering defines and enforces standards, guardrails, gates, and validation logic within existing CI/CD and developer experience investments, and drives consistent adoption of a trusted, instrumented release path. The function partners with SRE, Dev/Engineering, Infrastructure, and Change Management so every production change is observable, validated, and reversible before release. It executes reliability standards such as Production Readiness Reviews (PRR), operational readiness requirements, SLO-based deployment policies, and incident-learning outcomes. The role leads a high-performing Release Engineering organization and drives automation, standardization, and continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle. It works across organizational boundaries to improve production reliability while prioritizing safety and avoiding unnecessary adoption friction. Success includes reducing change-related incidents, implementing fleet-scale deployment strategies and automated validation, and improving release recovery metrics.

Requirements

At least 7 years of senior software engineering leadership experience, including people management skills in high-growth or high-availability environments.
At least 3 years of deep hands-on experience with CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Harness; cloud platforms such as Azure or GCP; and containerization technologies such as Kubernetes or Docker.
At least 3 years of experience optimizing complex build systems and branching/merging strategies.
At least 3 years of experience bridging engineering depth and business impact.
At least 3 years of experience focused on automation and customer service excellence.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience, defined as a high school diploma plus 4 years of relevant experience.

Nice To Haves

Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, including executive-level engagement.
Ability to lead cross-functional teams, including offshore/onshore vendor teams.
Experience implementing and improving SRE metrics in distributed environments.

Responsibilities

Own Change Failure Rate (CFR) as the primary success metric and maintain release-to-incident correlation for postmortems and problem management.
Reduce deployment-induced incidents through deployment automation, validation, and recovery engineering.
Define, enhance, and operate CI/CD capabilities and deployment automation.
Standardize delivery patterns across application, infrastructure, and edge platforms to improve reliability, consistency, and developer experience.
Establish automated pre- and post-deployment validation, integrating synthetic testing, health checks, and observability signals into deployment workflows.
Ensure production health is verified before deployment completion.
Define and enforce ring-based deployment strategies for store, edge, and centralized platforms; enable progressive delivery, automated promotion gates, and controlled rollouts to minimize blast radius.
Ensure every deployment has tested rollback or failback capabilities, and improve recovery time for release-related incidents through automation.
Enable feature flags, traffic controls, and other deployment safety mechanisms.
Standardize validation and rollback requirements for high-risk infrastructure changes; automate post-maintenance verification and health validation.
Partner with infrastructure teams to improve change reliability and reduce change-induced incidents.
Provide deployment and change context during major incidents, support release impact analysis during postmortems, and drive improvements based on incident learnings and problem records.
Build and develop a high-performing Release Engineering organization.
Establish engineering-first delivery practices that prioritize reliability and safety without adding adoption friction.
Champion automation, standardization, and continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle.
Partner with SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and Change Management to improve production reliability through cross-organizational influence.
Establish a CFR baseline across key platforms, implement standardized deployment validation and rollback requirements, and integrate PRR requirements into release workflows within the first 90 days.
Operationalize automated deployment validation for priority platforms, implement a ring-based deployment model for selected domains, and achieve a measurable reduction in change-related incidents within six months.
Standardize the enterprise deployment platform across major domains, integrate automated safety gates with observability and SLO signals, and consistently report and improve CFR and deployment recovery metrics within 12 months.