Release Manager

About This Role

This opportunity is for a talented and experienced individual to join Penn State University as a Release Manager on the Enterprise Customer Relationship Management Program Team. This program is designed to advance engagement and service delivery for the entire university community, ensuring integrated solutions that create value across all Penn State constituencies. The Release Manager is responsible for orchestrating and streamlining the software release process across development, testing, and production environments, combining technical expertise in Dev Ops practices with project management skills to ensure reliable, efficient, and traceable software deployments.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain comprehensive release management strategy and roadmap
• Coordinate release schedules across multiple teams and projects
• Define release criteria, processes, and approval workflows
• Establish and monitor service level agreements for release activities
• Deploy and maintain enterprise Dev Ops services to streamline release management
• Enhance automation capabilities across the CI/CD pipeline
• Implement and maintain deployment automation tools and processes
• Ensure full environment traceability throughout the release lifecycle
• Serve as point of contact for the purchased Dev Ops and backup tool
• Maintain disaster recovery plans and support business continuity efforts, including monitoring and testing of backups
• Oversee development, testing, staging, and production environments
• Maintain environment configuration consistency and documentation
• Coordinate environment provisioning and capacity planning
• Monitor environment health and performance metrics
• Establish and enforce code versioning best practices
• Implement deployment methodologies and standards
• Conduct release readiness assessments and go/no-go decisions
• Manage rollback procedures and incident response protocols
• Facilitate release planning meetings and communication
• Coordinate with development, QA, operations, and business teams
• Provide release status updates to leadership and stakeholders
• Manage change control processes and documentation

Requirements

• Strong background in software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes
• Experience with both waterfall and agile development methodologies
• Demonstrated experience owning end-to-end software releases through production, including coordinating complex releases across multiple technical teams, applications or work streams, and environments
• Experience coordinating releases across development, testing/UAT, staging, and production environments