Release Manager

As our Release Manager, you will bring the governance, rigour, communication, and cross team leadership needed to ensure every release is planned, tested, risk assessed, approved, and successfully deployed. This is a newly created, high impact role with real influence - without direct line management, but with significant leadership across Change, IT, Operations, Testing, Architecture, and third party suppliers.

Your key tasks and responsibilities will include:

• Implement and own our Release Management Framework
• Coordinate all steps of the route to live lifecycle - planning, scheduling, testing, approvals, deployment, early life support and post implementation review
• Maintain the Forward Schedule of Change, preventing collisions and giving clear visibility of upcoming releases
• Assure business readiness, technical readiness, and operational readiness for every deployment
• Lead cross team and vendor coordination to ensure smooth, predictable release cycles
• Manage risks, issues, and go/no go criteria, making well reasoned decisions during release windows
• Champion continuous improvement, automation, tooling, and data driven insights
• Provide clear communication to senior stakeholders, project teams, and impacted business areas

• Able to build strong, collaborative relationships across teams
• Communicates clearly and calmly, even during incident or release pressure
• Is naturally structured, disciplined, and highly organised
• Brings curiosity and forward thinking to improve processes and tooling
• Makes sound decisions backed by evidence and risk awareness
• Always considers the customer impact of releases

Essential experience:

• Significant experience in Release Management and Environment Management, including establishing and implementing structures
• Strong technical understanding of multi-system, multi-vendor IT landscapes
• Proven success coordinating releases across internal teams and third party suppliers
• Excellent communication, influence, and stakeholder management capability
• Strong grounding in SDLC, DevOps, testing, and change management
• Confidence under pressure, with the ability to make informed decisions quickly

Desirable:

• Experience in regulated or high risk environments (e.g., FS, banking, building societies)
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines or release automation tooling
• ITIL certification or CAB/governance forum experience