Senior Manager, Software Product & Release Operations

Aurora•San Francisco, CA

10h•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora’s Product Operations team partners with product, operations, and engineering to ensure commercial operations capabilities are delivered on time, safely, and efficiently. The Software Product & Release Operations function owns the release cadence and readiness of software Aurora ships, bridging engineering roadmaps and operational readiness. The Senior Manager will own the software release cycle end-to-end, from build readiness through rollout, as Aurora scales production following its first AAET launch. The position is accountable for software Go/No-Go decisions and translates engineering roadmaps into operational readiness plans. It partners closely with Aurora Driver and Service Engineering, Launch Operations, and Product Ops & Platform Enablement, as well as senior leaders across Engineering, Product, and Commercial Operations. The role reports to the Senior Director, Product Operations. It is based in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, or Dallas, with travel to test sites and partner facilities as needed. Aurora expects employees to work from the office at least three days per week, with some roles requiring up to five days based on operational needs.

Requirements

At least 7 years of experience in program or product operations, technical program management, or release management, ideally in a software-driven environment with adjacent hardware dependencies.
Demonstrated experience owning a software release cycle end-to-end, including build readiness, rollout, and defect management.
Proven track record of building or improving feature and bug tracking systems and processes at scale.
Strong cross-functional stakeholder management skills and credibility with both Engineering and Operations.
Ability to operate in a fast-scaling, R&D-to-commercial transition environment and build repeatable processes without over-engineering them around a changing technical target.
Strong analytical and communication skills, including the ability to translate technical release data into clear, actionable recommendations for technical and executive audiences.
Ability to influence stakeholders without direct authority and bring clarity to ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience in autonomous vehicles, automotive, or another safety-critical software domain.
Familiarity with how software releases interact with hardware or platform dependencies.
Background in technical program management or software release engineering.
Experience using BI tools such as Tableau, Looker, or Power BI for release metrics tracking.
Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, or equivalent release and backlog tracking tools.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the enterprise operations release strategy across software, autonomous systems, and fleet operations, ensuring the framework scales with business and fleet growth.
Define and institute company-wide release readiness and risk-gating standards, and serve as the accountable authority for the evaluation framework used by leadership to clear commercial deployments.
Align multi-year capability roadmaps with commercial and business go-to-market expansion targets in partnership with VP- and Director-level leaders across Engineering, Product, and Commercial Operations.
Unify release governance across interdependent software, hardware, and platform changes, resolving trade-offs and dependencies when release timelines conflict with operational readiness.
Define, own, and report enterprise release predictability, defect escape metrics, and roadmap-to-readiness lead times for executive leadership.
Standardize backlog hygiene and defect escalation pathways across software and operational release pipelines, maintaining feedback loops between field performance and engineering.
Own and evolve the software release and change-management cycle from build readiness through rollout in partnership with Software Engineering.
Manage feature and bug tracking and defect escalation paths across the software release pipeline.
Partner with Product Ops & Platform Enablement on releases spanning software and hardware or platform changes; defer Go/No-Go authority for hardware and platform components to that team.
Travel to test sites and partner facilities as needed.