Release & Reliability Engineering (DevOps, QA, Release Management)

Director of Release & Reliability Engineering (DevOps, QA, Release Management)Location:Bangalore (Onsite) Experience :12+ years in SaaS/Cloud engineering; 5+ years leading Release, or DevOps &QA functions. Budget:50 LPACompany:The US headquarters offers AI-powered employee support for SaaS. Its SaaS products automate the entire service desk operations, which drastically improves the speed of employee issue resolution with minimal human intervention. The product leverages Conversational AI and NLU (Natural Language Understanding) to create a seamless service desk experience. The company's product vision is to ensure that the entire employee L1 support layer is automated to give employees instant problem resolution and reduce costs for their clients. The company has won multiple awards and is recognized as the hottest SaaS vendor in multiple forums in the last few years. It is a series A funded company backed by some of the most reputed Venture Funds, looking to aggressively invest in its strengthening its product platform and investing in growth.Role OverviewThis leader will own platform stability, release discipline, and defect prevention across the Company You’ll manage a small but high-impact team that:Runs predictable release cycles with excellent communication. • Balances automated and manual testing to catch issues early. • Provides strong production support through deep root cause analysis (RCA) and preventative measures (e.g., 5 Whys). • Drives DevOps practices to deliver reliable, zero-downtime deployments. You’ll be the person the organization looks to for confidence in every release.Key ResponsibilitiesRelease Management & Change Control• Own the end-to-end release process: planning, approvals, cutover, post-release validation. • Implement structured change management with phase gates, release notes, rollback/roll- forward playbooks, and clear go/no-go criteria. • Lead release communications to internal teams, customers, and stakeholders—building trust and predictability. • Balance speed vs. risk; ensure compliance with security and audit requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001).Quality Assurance (Automation + Manual)• Define and execute a hybrid QA strategy: automation-first, but with structured manual testing for edge cases, UX validation, and exploratory testing. • Oversee regression, functional, performance, and security testing. • Enforce quality gates in CI/CD; partner with engineers on “shift-left” practices. • Measure and reduce defect leakage, ensuring defects are prevented—not just detected.Production Support & StabilityAct as the owner of platform stability—leading incident response, root cause analysis, and preventative measures actions. • Institutionalize blameless postmortems and 5 Whys methodology to drive learning. • Track SLOs and SLIs (uptime, latency, error rates); enforce error budgets as part of release gating. • Continuously reduce MTTR (mean time to recovery) and P1/P2 recurrence rates.DevOps & Reliability EngineeringLead CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and deployment automation. • Implement progressive delivery (blue/green, canary, feature flags). • Maintain observability: dashboards, alerting, and synthetic monitoring. • Ensure zero-downtime releases and backwards compatibility for a multi-tenant SaaS environment.Qualifications• Track record of delivering stable, high-quality SaaS releases at scale. • Strong background in change management, release governance, and stakeholder communication. • Hands-on with CI/CD, cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), observability, and modern QA tooling. • Experienced in manual and automated testing practices—able to build both strategy and discipline. • Strong analytical/problem-solving skills; proven ability to lead root cause analysis and preventative action. • Collaborative leader with excellent cross-functional influence. Success in This Role Looks Like Predictable releases with fewer escaped defects and zero major outages. • High confidence in release quality from Product, Support, and Customers. • Clear and timely release communications—no surprises. • Strong RCA discipline: production issues decline over time as preventions are implemented. • QA team respected as a partner, not a gatekeeper.