QA/QE release manager

(JD) Must-Have Skills 10+ years in QA/QE, release management, or release engineering, including 3+ years owning release quality for multi-team or multi-domain releases. Release cut planning: Proven experience running release calendars, cut and branch strategies, release candidate selection, and go/no-go governance. Feature flag management: Hands-on experience with a feature flag platform (e.g., LaunchDarkly or equivalent), including flag governance, rollout strategy, and the toggle-versus-revert model. Deployment quality: Strong understanding of CI/CD and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, staged rollout, rollback, hotfix). Experience defining and enforcing quality gates in pipelines (e.g., Harness, Jenkins, GitHub Actions). Change management collaboration: Experience working within CAB and change control processes (e.g., ServiceNow), and partnering with TechOps, SRE, and Security. Strong working knowledge of SDLC, Agile/Scrum, and Definition of Done practices. Experience with Jira, test management and defect tools and release dashboards. Ability to define and report release quality KPIs to senior technology leadership. Excellent communication and influencing skills. Able to act as a go/no-go gatekeeper and drive alignment across Engineering, QE, and Operations without direct authority. Strong RCA and issue-prevention discipline. Nice-to-Have Skills Background in QSR, retail, or eCommerce environments, including POS, payments, or loyalty platforms. Familiarity with SOX/PCI DSS change control and audit evidence requirements. Experience building release tooling or automation, such as release CLIs, single-pane release dashboards, or Jira/Harness integrations. Experience with observability and monitoring tools, and with SRE hypercare handoff practices. Knowledge of release confidence scoring, error budgeting, or DORA metrics. Experience with ephemeral environments and environment booking or coordination. Exposure to Google Cloud Platform and cloud-native deployment architectures. Familiarity with test automation and smoke test integration into pipelines. Certifications such as ISTQB, SAFe/Agile, ITIL, or equivalent. Expected Outcomes Within 30 days: Document the current release process, cut cadence, feature flag usage, and change management touchpoints. Identify gaps and quick wins. Within 90 days: Formalize pre-cut and pre-release go/no-go criteria, feature flag standards, and the production readiness checklist. Establish release quality metrics and reporting. Within 6 months: Show measurable reduction in release-related incidents and rollbacks. Have flag governance and change management integration operating consistently, and a single, documented release process communicated to all delivery teams.