Release Manager

Job Location s: US-MD-Rockville | US-TX-Austin | US-TX-Dallas

Job :

Category:
Production

Type:
Regular Full-Time

Come join Bethesda Game Studios, the award‑winning development team behind Starfield, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Bethesda Game Studios strives to offer its employees a well‑balanced home and work life by providing competitive salaries, a generous benefits program, and offices located in some of North America’s best cities.

With a goal of creating a culture as fun and diverse as our games and our players, we welcome applicants with unique skillsets, experience levels and backgrounds. If you are passionate about making a meaningful contribution to some of the most significant games in the industry we’d love to hear from you!

We will consider candidates for any of our four Bethesda Game Studios office locations:
Rockville, MD;
Montreal, Quebec;
Austin, TX;
Dallas, TX.

• Own the end‑to‑end path to live for each release or major milestone, including certification, first‑party submission, ratings, and lead final go/no‑go decision points.
• Drive release readiness through direct ownership of dependencies, reporting, and issue escalation. Run cross‑functional release readiness meetings to ensure alignment, transparency, and clear decision‑making.
• Track and manage release dependencies, risks, and blockers – escalate issues early, resolve them ahead of release, and provide on‑call support during release windows.
• Plan, schedule, and lead multi‑platform releases across development, QA, operations, platform partners, and publishing teams.
• Maintain release calendars, deployment plans, cutover and rollback strategies, and key documentation (runbooks, timelines, release artifacts).
• Own certification and submission processes across first‑party platforms – Play Station (Sony), Xbox (Microsoft), Nintendo, and Steam – managing platform‑specific requirements, ratings board submissions, and release timing with each partner.
• Stay current on all first‑party and ratings board requirements and proactively communicate policy and process changes to stakeholders.
• Provide clear, timely status reporting on release readiness, risks, and outcomes across projects – giving stakeholders and leadership consistent visibility into release health, timelines, and trends.
• Collaborate with engineering to evaluate, improve, and document build pipelines, branching strategies, and delivery systems – reducing friction, increasing stability, and ensuring releases meet compliance requirements across all platforms.
• Serve as the technical owner of publishing and deployment work, including build readiness, environment coordination, submission timing, and release execution.
• Maintain a centralized release repository with processes, dependencies, communication lists, release details, and archived final assets, ensuring all submissions meet first‑party, ratings board, and broader compliance requirements.
• Drive consistency, predictability, and continuous improvement in how we ship, using data, retrospectives, and feedback.
• Support and contribute to broader studio and publishing initiatives as needed.

• 5+ years owning end‑to‑end releases of AAA games through first‑party platforms (Play Station, Xbox, Nintendo) and major PC storefronts (Steam).
• Hands‑on experience submitting titles to major and regional age rating boards — including ESRB, PEGI, CERO, USK, ACB, IARC, Class Ind, GRAC, and CSRR — managing questionnaires, content descriptors, resubmissions, and rating certificate delivery across global markets.
• Demonstrated ownership of AAA release life cycles across development, QA, platform partners, and publishing – from internal milestone builds and first submission through live, including flighting, and post‑launch updates.
• Proven experience serving as a primary point of contact with first‑party platform partners – managing submission timelines, issues, and escalations directly with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve.
• Strong ability to manage risk, drive decisions, and operate effectively under time‑critical release conditions.
• Experience owning releases that did not go as planned, with the judgment and lessons learned…