Technical Program Manager, Release Management - C3 Agentic AI Platform

The C3 Agentic AI Platform is the foundation of the C3 AI application suite, C3 Generative AI, and the C3 AI Integrated Development Studio. Every release you ship is inherited by dozens of enterprise applications and the customers running them in production. This is a hands-on, technical role - you will be in the branch plan, the release readiness evidence, the defect triage, and the deployment window itself, not reporting on them from a distance. You will work alongside platform engineering, product management, data science, quality engineering, and cloud operations, and you will be the single person accountable for release state at any moment., * Define release scope, cadence, and schedule for the C3 Agentic AI Platform, including branch cuts, code freeze, release candidates, GA, and patch and hotfix lines.

• Maintain complete and current state on every item in the release: committed features, open dependencies, blocking defects, and the critical path to GA.
• Identify release risks early, force the trade-off conversation between scope, schedule, and quality, and drive the decision to closure rather than escalating it upward undecided.
• Own the release readiness checklist and its exit criteria across code quality, security, performance, scalability, and upgrade and migration paths.
• Review the evidence submitted for each readiness task against our guidelines and reject what does not meet the bar.
• Run the go/no-go with engineering and product leadership, with a documented recommendation and the data behind it.
• Act as the primary point of contact through the deployment window: field deployment issues, own escalations, and execute rollback or contingency plans when needed.
• Coordinate release communication to internal stakeholders, application teams, and customer-facing organizations before, during, and after deployment.
• Drive release-related incidents to root cause with the owning teams and close the loop into the process.
• Partner with release engineering and infrastructure teams to reduce manual steps in build, test, and deployment, and to shorten the path from code freeze to GA.
• Onboard engineering teams onto release tooling and hold them to the process.
• Instrument the release process and report on it: release predictability, cycle time from freeze to GA, escaped defect rate, hotfix volume, and readiness task turnaround.
• Run release retrospectives, land the corrective actions, and cascade the resulting process changes across the engineering organization.
• Maintain release documentation, release notes inputs, and the audit trail required by our quality processes.

• Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years in technical program management, release management, or engineering program ownership for a commercial software product.
• Demonstrated ownership of software releases end to end: defining release scope, managing dependencies and risk, scheduling, and shipping to production on a recurring cadence.
• Working fluency with modern software delivery mechanics: source control and branching strategy, CI/CD, test automation, defect triage, and cloud deployment.
• Strong understanding of AI and machine learning concepts and the technologies behind them.
• Track record of creating a process and getting an organization to actually follow it.
• Ability to hold a quality bar under schedule pressure, and the judgment to know when the bar should move and when it should not.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with both engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Proficiency with Agile, Scrum, or Kanban and the tooling around them (e.g. Jira).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on background in software engineering, quality engineering, or data science.
• Experience releasing an enterprise platform or PaaS consumed by internal application teams as well as external customers.
• Experience with multi-cloud or air-gapped deployment environments, and with compliance-constrained release processes (e.g. FedRAMP, SOC 2).
• PMP, Agile, or Scrum certification.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future company sponsorship.

C3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan. California Base Pay Range $131,000-$190,000 USD