Release Manager/ Cloud Engineering

N-iX is a global software development service company that helps businesses across the globe create next-generation software products. Founded in 2002, we unite 2,400+ tech-savvy professionals across 40+ countries, working on impactful projects for industry leaders and Fortune 500 companies. Our expertise spans cloud, data, AI/ML, embedded software, IoT, and more, driving digital transformation across finance, manufacturing, telecom, healthcare, and other industries. Join N-iX and become part of a team where your ideas make a real impact. Role Summary: As a Release Management contractor, you will be a release enabler for client’s core services, coordinating cross-team release activities across environments and products. You will own the operational lifecycle of releases - from calendar planning and release readiness through execution, validation, and post-release follow-up - ensuring changes ship safely, predictably, and in compliance with client’s change-management and audit standards. You will partner closely with Engineering, SRE, the Operations Center, Incident Command, Security, and Product to minimize release risk while improving velocity and automation, acting as a primary contact for release status, blockers, and hot-patch decisioning during your coverage window. Responsibilities : - Coordinate release planning and calendars for core products. - Run end-to-end release processes and weekly patches: track builds through environments, ensuring all gates and approvals are met before promotion. - Own and facilitate Go/No-Go processes for major releases occurring within the coverage window: prepare status, verify test results, highlight risks, and record Go/No-Go outcomes and follow-ups. - Create and manage Release Authorizations (RA) and related artifacts to meet compliance and audit requirements. - Partner with the DOC team to sequence and monitor deployments across regions and sites. Ensure pre-deployment checks are completed, support troubleshooting of failed deployment jobs where RM is accountable. - Enforce change-management and business-hours policies during off-hours, including No-Fly/moratorium periods, emergency change exceptions, and adherence to defined patch and hot-patch criteria. - Drive late-merge and hot-patch governance. - Maintain and improve release observability: partner with Engineering/SRE to evolve RM dashboards, status views, and metrics showing release readiness, deployment progress, and risk across services and environments. - Support post-release quality by coordinating validation evidence. - Support root-cause and post-mortem work for release-related incidents and deployment regressions. - Communicate clearly and proactively: provide concise release status, risk, and impact summaries to engineering leaders, incident commanders, and DOC, and ensure release email updates and stakeholder notifications are timely and accurate. Requirements: - Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field. - 3+ years of experience in Release Management, Program/Project Management, SRE/DevOps, or Technical Operations supporting production software releases. - Experience managing multi-environment release pipelines (e.g., development, demo, production, regulated environments) with formal gates and approvals. - Hands-on experience with Jira (or equivalent) for driving release epics/stories, change records, and cross-team work tracking. - Familiarity with CI/CD and deployment tooling such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GoCD, or equivalent release automation pipelines. - Strong understanding of SDLC and change-management controls (CAB, change types, rollback planning, audit evidence) in a SaaS or enterprise environment. - Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional stakeholders (Engineering, SRE, Security, Product) under time pressure and drive to clear decisions. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability to summarize complex technical risk and status for non-technical stakeholders. - Ability and willingness to work the 7:00 PM – 4:00 AM PST coverage window reliably, acting as the primary Release Management contact during those hours. Preferred Qualifications: - Experience running releases for large distributed systems or multi-product platforms. - Experience with observability and validation tooling such as Kusto, Grafana or equivalent for data-driven Go/No-Go decisions. - Background in or close partnership with operations/SRE teams, including exposure to incident response and post-mortem practices. - Experience contributing to or leading release-process transformation efforts (e.g., increased automation, dashboarding and metrics). - Comfort working with SQL/DBA partners and understanding database deployment considerations as part of coordinated releases. We offer*: - Flexible working format - remote, office-based or flexible - A competitive salary and good compensation package - Personalized career growth - Professional development tools (mentorship program, tech talks and trainings, centers of excellence, and more) - Active tech communities with regular knowledge sharing - Education reimbursement - Memorable anniversary presents - Corporate events and team buildings - Other location-specific benefits *not applicable for freelancers