Overview

A TraceLink Release Engineering Manager leads a team of release engineers to accelerate the delivery of high-quality software, ensure operational excellence, and maintain release infrastructure. This is a technical leadership position requiring a deep understanding of software development lifecycles, automated build/test systems, and scalable, repeatable deployment practices.

The role works with large, complex systems, collaborating with software engineers (SWEs) and site reliability engineers (SREs) to define the release process from source code to production deployment. A key focus is empowering product teams through a self-service model, automating away manual "toil," and balancing the need for speed (high velocity) with the need for reliability.

Responsibilities

• Team leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a team of release engineers. Provide technical guidance, conduct performance reviews, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning.
• Strategic planning: Define and execute the roadmap for release engineering, including the development of new tooling and infrastructure that aligns with business needs for faster and more reliable releases.
• Process ownership: Own the end-to-end release process, from code check-in to deployment in production. Continuously evolve processes to ensure they are consistent, automated, and repeatable at scale.
• Infrastructure development: Oversee the design, development, and maintenance of critical release infrastructure, including Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Act as a central point of contact and bridge communication between engineering teams (SWEs, SREs), technical program managers, and product managers to coordinate complex, multi-team projects.
• Risk and incident management: Identify and mitigate risks related to release quality, stability, and security. Lead incident response and post-mortems for deployment issues.
• Metrics and reporting: Define, collect, and analyze release-related metrics (e.g., release velocity, deployment frequency, success rates) to drive improvements and report on release health to stakeholders.
• Best practices: Champion and enforce release engineering best practices across the organization, such as hermetic builds and repeatable deployment strategies.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience:
  • 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, site reliability engineer, or DevOps engineer, with a focus on build and release processes.
  • 2+ years of demonstrated experience in people management or a technical leadership role.
  • Experience managing end-to-end execution of software release programs and working with large-scale distributed systems.
  • Demonstrated experience or strong curiosity in leveraging AI/ML, especially Agentic AI, to enhance software release processes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical skills: Deep knowledge of CI/CD, configuration management, and version control systems (e.g., Git). Experience with container technologies such as Docker and orchestration tools like Kubernetes.
• Programming experience: Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, Go, Java, C++) and experience building automation tools.
• AI/ML expertise: Experience in releasing enterprise-grade AI/ML models and managing runtime environments in production.
• Operational expertise: Strong understanding of site reliability engineering (SRE) principles, including SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, and incident management.
• Problem-solving: Strong analytical skills with a systematic approach to identifying and resolving complex, ambiguous problems.
• Coordination: Experience in multi-team coordination and release engineering within highly regulated environments.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional teams and present to leadership.