Required Qualifications:
● 5+ years in software delivery (release management, technical program/project management, QA leadership, or build/release engineering), including 3+ years owning releases of a complex commercial software product.
● Demonstrated experience running a fixed-cadence / release-train model and enforcing quality gates - including concrete examples of deferring features under stakeholder pressure.
● Solid working knowledge of branching strategies (feature branches, integration/product branches, release branches), merge windows, and code freeze - and how testing maps onto them (feature-level testing vs. integration/regression on the shared branch).
● Understanding of QA processes: test planning, test execution and sign-off, regression scoping, severity/priority triage, defect exit criteria. Able to read and challenge test status, not just collect it.
● Sufficient CI/CD literacy to follow build pipelines, build status, and artifact promotion (Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab CI, or similar).
● Outstanding stakeholder management: able to say "no" to senior engineers and product managers, escalate cleanly, and keep everyone informed without friction.
● Strong organizational discipline: calendars, checklists, criteria, follow-through.
● Intermediate level in English
Desired Qualifications:
● Prior background in QA or
software engineering before moving into release/program management (QA background is a strong plus given the gatekeeping mandate).
● Experience releasing on-premises / enterprise software: installers, multi-OS builds, upgrade paths, long support lifecycles - not only SaaS.
● Experience with Early Access / beta programs feeding into GA.
● Familiarity with the backup, storage, or virtualization domain (VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox, physical, cloud workloads).
● Certifications: SAFe RTE (Release Train Engineer), ITIL (Release & Deployment Management), PMP/PRINCE2.
● Comfortable using AI tools (e.g., LLM assistants connected to Jira/Confluence) to automate release reporting, with enough JQL and data literacy to define the metrics and validate the output.