Senior Manager - Release Engineering

CVS Health•Woonsocket, RI

5d•$130,295 - $260,590

About The Position

CVS Health is seeking an experienced, strategic leader to oversee Release Engineering for Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness. The organization owns the safety, consistency, and recoverability of application, platform, infrastructure, and edge changes across CVS Health’s pharmacy, retail, and digital technology ecosystem, including approximately 9,000 stores, centralized platforms, and edge and dispensing systems. The team 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. Release Engineering partners with SRE, Development and Engineering, Infrastructure, and Change Management to ensure production changes are observable, validated, and reversible before release. It also executes reliability standards, including Production Readiness Reviews (PRR), operational readiness requirements, SLO-based deployment policies, and incident-learning outcomes. The Senior Manager will own Change Failure Rate (CFR) as the primary success metric and lead efforts to reduce deployment-induced incidents through automation, validation, and recovery engineering. The role establishes deployment validation and safety practices; standardizes delivery patterns; leads fleet-scale, ring-based deployment strategies; ensures tested rollback or failback capabilities; improves infrastructure change reliability; and integrates incident learning into release improvements. The role also builds and develops a high-performing Release Engineering organization and leads cross-functionally to improve production reliability, safety, automation, and developer experience.

Requirements

At least 7 years of senior software engineering leadership experience, with 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 and 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; equivalent experience is 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 and onshore vendor teams.
Experience implementing and improving SRE metrics in distributed environments.

Responsibilities

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.
Define, enhance, and operate CI/CD capabilities and deployment automation.
Standardize delivery patterns across application, infrastructure, and edge platforms.
Improve deployment reliability, consistency, and developer experience.
Establish automated pre-deployment and post-deployment validation.
Integrate 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 rollout strategies.
Minimize deployment blast radius through phased deployment patterns.
Ensure every deployment has tested rollback or failback capabilities.
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.
Drive deployment-related 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, leading through cross-organizational influence.
Establish a CFR baseline across key platforms within the first 90 days.
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 and implement a ring-based deployment model for selected domains within six months.
Deliver measurable reduction in change-related incidents within six months.
Standardize the enterprise deployment platform across major domains and integrate automated deployment safety gates with observability and SLO signals within 12 months.
Ensure CFR and deployment recovery metrics are consistently reported and improved, and establish Release Engineering as a key enabler of reliability and operational excellence.