Technical Program Manager, Release Management - C3 Agentic AI Platform

C3.ai•Redwood City, CA

15d•Onsite

About The Position

C3 AI is seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead release management for the C3 Agentic AI Platform. This role involves end-to-end ownership of the release process, from defining the release scope and schedule to ensuring quality, making go/no-go decisions, and successfully shipping the product to production on time. The C3 Agentic AI Platform is foundational to C3 AI's product suite, including C3 Generative AI and the C3 AI Integrated Development Studio. Releases managed by this role impact numerous enterprise applications and their production customers. This is a hands-on, technical position requiring active involvement in branch planning, release readiness assessment, defect triage, and deployment execution, working closely with platform engineering, product management, data science, quality engineering, and cloud operations. The Technical Program Manager will be solely accountable for the release status at all times.

Requirements

Bachelor's or graduate degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
5+ years in technical program management, release management, or engineering program ownership for a commercial software product.
Demonstrated ownership of software releases end to end: defining release scope, managing dependencies and risk, scheduling, and shipping to production on a recurring cadence.
Working fluency with modern software delivery mechanics: source control and branching strategy, CI/CD, test automation, defect triage, and cloud deployment.
Strong understanding of AI and machine learning concepts and the technologies behind them.
Track record of creating a process and getting an organization to actually follow it.
Ability to maintain a quality bar under schedule pressure, with the judgment to know when the bar should move and when it should not.
Excellent written and verbal communication with both engineering teams and senior leadership.
Proficiency with Agile, Scrum, or Kanban and the tooling around them (e.g. Jira).

Nice To Haves

Hands-on background in software engineering, quality engineering, or data science.
Experience releasing an enterprise platform or PaaS consumed by internal application teams as well as external customers.
Experience with multi-cloud or air-gapped deployment environments, and with compliance-constrained release processes (e.g. FedRAMP, SOC 2).
PMP, Agile, or Scrum certification.

Responsibilities

Define release scope, cadence, and schedule for the C3 Agentic AI Platform, including branch cuts, code freeze, release candidates, GA, and patch and hotfix lines.
Maintain complete and current state on every item in the release: committed features, open dependencies, blocking defects, and the critical path to GA.
Identify release risks early, facilitate trade-off discussions between scope, schedule, and quality, and drive decisions to closure.
Own the release readiness checklist and its exit criteria across code quality, security, performance, scalability, and upgrade and migration paths.
Review evidence submitted for each readiness task against guidelines and reject submissions that do not meet the bar.
Lead the go/no-go decision with engineering and product leadership, providing a documented recommendation and supporting data.
Serve as the primary point of contact during the deployment window, managing deployment issues, owning escalations, and executing rollback or contingency plans as needed.
Coordinate release communication to internal stakeholders, application teams, and customer-facing organizations before, during, and after deployment.
Drive release-related incidents to root cause analysis with owning teams and ensure feedback loops into the process.
Partner with release engineering and infrastructure teams to automate build, test, and deployment processes and shorten the time from code freeze to GA.
Onboard engineering teams to release tooling and ensure adherence to the release process.
Instrument the release process and report on key metrics such as release predictability, cycle time from freeze to GA, escaped defect rate, hotfix volume, and readiness task turnaround.
Conduct release retrospectives, implement corrective actions, and disseminate resulting process changes across the engineering organization.
Maintain release documentation, contribute to release notes, and ensure the audit trail required by quality processes is upheld.