Senior Manager - Release Engineering

CVS Health•Woonsocket, RI

1d•$130,295 - $260,590

About The Position

We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time. Position Summary: CVS Health is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to oversee Release Engineering for the Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness. Release Engineering owns the safety, consistency, and recoverability of application, platform, infrastructure, and edge changes across CVS Health's pharmacy, retail, and digital technology ecosystem (~9,000 stores, centralized platforms, and edge/dispensing systems). The team defines and enforces the standards, guardrails, gates, and validation logic into pipelines that ride on top of our existing CI/CD and DevX investments, and drives their consistent adoption. Success looks like every engineering team shipping through the same trusted, instrumented release path. Release Engineering partners with SRE, Dev/Engineering, Infrastructure, and Change Management so that every production change is observable, validated, and reversible before it ships, and executes against reliability standards: Production Readiness Reviews (PRR), operational readiness requirements, SLO-based deployment policies, and incident-learning outcomes.

Requirements

7+ years of senior software engineering leadership experience, with people management skills in high-growth or high-availability environments
3+ years of deep hands-on background in CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Harness), cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes, Docker)
3+ years of experience optimizing complex build systems and branching/merging strategies
3+ years of experience bridging the gap between engineering depth and business impact
3+ years of experience focused on automation and customer service excellence
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years 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

Change Failure Reduction: Own Change Failure Rate (CFR) as the primary success metric. Reduce deployment-induced incidents through deployment automation, validation, and recovery engineering. Maintain release-to-incident correlation to support postmortems and problem management.
Deployment Guardrail & Governance Engineering: Define, enhance, operate CI/CD capabilities and deployment automation. Standardize delivery patterns across application, infrastructure, and edge platforms. Improve deployment reliability, consistency, and developer experience.
Deployment Safety & Validation: Establish automated pre- and post-deployment validation. Integrate synthetic testing, health checks, and observability signals into deployment workflows. Ensure production health is verified before deployment completion.
Fleet-Scale Deployment Management: Define and enforce ring-based deployment strategies for store, edge, and centralized platforms. Enable progressive delivery, automated promotion gates, and controlled rollout strategies. Minimize blast radius through phased deployment patterns.
Recovery Engineering: Ensure every deployment has tested rollback or failback capabilities. Improve recovery time for release-related incidents through automation. Enable feature flags, traffic controls, and deployment safety mechanisms.
Infrastructure Change Reliability: 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.
Incident & Learning Integration: Provide deployment and change context during major incidents. Support release impact analysis during postmortems. Drive deployment-related improvements from incident learnings and problem records.
Leadership Responsibilities: 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. This role sits at intersection and must lead through cross-org influence.