Senior Engineering Manager - Release Engineering

Mercury is a financial technology company that focuses on seamless software delivery processes. They are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Release Engineering team, ensuring fast and reliable software deployment while fostering a culture of operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a team of four engineers focused on CI/CD infrastructure, build systems, deployment automation, and developer tooling
• Create a strong culture of operational excellence, with measurable improvements to pipeline reliability, build times, and deployment confidence
• Own Mercury's release pipeline end-to-end — from pull request merge to production — ensuring it is fast, reliable, observable, and secure
• Drive the strategy and execution for improving build performance, test reliability, deployment safety (canaries, feature flags, rollbacks), and developer velocity
• Partner closely with Platform, Security, and Product Engineering teams to design and deliver systems that meet the demands of a rapidly scaling fintech
• Establish and evangelize release engineering best practices across Mercury's engineering org — defining standards for deployment frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR
• Balance long-term platform investments with the day-to-day reliability needs of 400+ engineers shipping code every day
• Build and maintain tooling that enforces compliance checkpoints and audit trails as part of the release pipeline — without slowing teams down
• Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier engineers; help them grow into technical leads and raise the overall bar for the team

Requirements:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams in high-growth or high-availability environments
• Deep hands-on experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI) and the infrastructure that supports them
• Strong background in build systems (Bazel, Buck2), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar)
• A track record of meaningfully improving release velocity and reliability — you measure what matters and use data to drive decisions
• Experience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments, ideally fintech, payments, or banking
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills — you can translate between engineering depth and business impact, and you partner effectively with Security, Compliance, and Product leaders
• A pragmatic philosophy: you believe release infrastructure should be a force multiplier for product engineers, not a bureaucratic hurdle
• The ability to attract, develop, and retain exceptional talent — you take hiring and team development seriously