Software Delivery Strategist

About the Role:

The Product team forms the crux of our powerful platforms, connecting millions of customers with brands worldwide.

We are seeking an experienced DevOps Program Manager to own and drive the end-to-end software release quality process across our product portfolio.

This role ensures that every software release meets defined quality and reliability benchmarks while enabling smooth, predictable, and efficient release management practices.

Ideal candidate will lead cross-functional initiatives across Product management, engineering, QA, Ops, and Release teams to accelerate delivery, improve reliability, and secure scalable deployments across our SaaS platforms.

• Release Program Leadership: Own and drive strategic DevOps programs across product teams, ensuring alignment with business goals and delivery timelines.
• Release Management Plan (Program Layer): Operationalize the Release Management Process environment promotion strategy, approvals, rollback plans, and audit trail.
• CI/CD Governance: Oversee the implementation and optimization of continuous integration and delivery pipelines, ensuring automation and traceability.
• Cross-Functional Stakeholder Collaboration: Act as a liaison between engineering, operations, product, and leadership teams to ensure transparency and accountability on release timelines, quality. Drive release communications on progress, risks, and release validations.
• Release quality and compliance: Collaborate with Engineering and QE teams to develop and enforce testing standards and acceptance criteria to meet release functional & non-functional requirements as per organizational policies, security & regulatory requirements.
• Manage risks and issues: Proactively identify risks that could impact release scope, quality, or schedule and develop mitigation plans. Coordinate with release engineers on code merges, branch ramifications, and manage dependencies.
• Release Metrics & Continuous Improvement: Define and track release KPIs related to deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and system uptime. Conduct Release retrospectives to gather feedback, identify lessons learned, and drive process improvement.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• At least 15 years of experience in program/project management in software with demonstrable ownership of cross-functional release, DevOps, or operations programs.
• Experience managing multiple parallel releases and coordinating distributed teams is essential.
• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, software engineering release management, or infrastructure roles, with at least 3 years in program or project management.
• Proven experience managing large-scale DevOps initiatives in a SaaS environment.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (Azure, AWS), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, ARM templates), release and project management tools (e.g., Jira, Jenkins, Git, CI/CD platforms).
• Solid understanding of the software development lifecycle, version control, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and automation tools.
• Familiarity with project management methodologies, Agile, Scrum, and SAFe methodologies.
• Excellent verbal & written communication, leadership, and team member management skills - ability to lead without authority, influence stakeholders, resolve conflicts, and motivate change.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with DevOps maturity assessments and roadmap development.
• Exposure to enterprise-scale release orchestration and incident management.
• Knowledge of ITIL/ITSM frameworks related to change and release management.
• Master's degree or formal project-management training (e.g., PMP, Scrum Master) is a plus.