Chief Release Manager

Job Description

At Boeing, we innovate and collaborate to make the world a better place. We're committed to fostering an environment for every teammate that's welcoming, respectful and inclusive, with great opportunity for professional growth. Find your future with us.

Boeing is seeking an accomplished Chief Release Manager for our Seattle, WA or Dallas, TX locations, to orchestrate end-to-end SAP releases across complex, multi-wave enterprise programs following the SAP Activate methodology. In this pivotal role you will serve as the central hub connecting functional work streams, technical teams, Basis operations, and business stakeholders - ensuring every release wave lands on time, within scope, and at the quality bar the business demands.

You will define and govern the release calendar, manage change & release strategies, coordinate transport management, and drive continuous improvement across the release lifecycle. Your deep understanding of SAP architecture - spanning Basis, ABAP development, and key functional modules - equips you to identify risks early, broker technical trade-offs, and keep complex dependencies from derailing program milestones.

Key Responsibilities

Release Planning & Wave Orchestration

* Design and maintain comprehensive wave-based release roadmaps aligned with SAP Activate phases (Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize, Deploy, Run).

* Define release scope, sequencing, and cutover strategies for each wave, coordinating across value streams, work streams, business and technical streams.

* Establish and enforce release gates, entry/exit criteria, and quality checkpoints across all waves.

* Lead release planning ceremonies including kick-offs, milestone reviews, go/no-go calls, and post-release retrospectives.

* Manage wave-level interdependencies, critical path analysis, and schedule risk mitigation.

Environment & Transport Management

* Own the SAP system migration strategy - defining configuration and governance of transport landscape from Development, QA, Pre-Production, and Production environments.

* Govern the transport management process using SAP certified migration tools (Active Control, Rev-Trac, Cloud ALM etc), ensuring all transports are tracked, tested, and promoted through the landscape in a controlled manner.

* Coordinate activities including system refreshes, client copies, kernel upgrades, and patch cycles in alignment with release schedules.

* Manage environment availability windows and prevent environment conflicts across concurrent work streams.

SAP Technical Oversight

* Apply working knowledge of SAP Basis (system administration, workload management, performance tuning, authorization concepts) to facilitate technical release decisions.

* Collaborate with ABAP development teams on transport packaging, code freeze enforcement, and regression risk assessment.

* Evaluate technical change impact analyses and translate findings into actionable release risk decisions.

* Oversee SAP system integrations, middleware touchpoints, and interface testing coordination within the release cycle.

* Support solution validation activities including SIT, UAT, performance testing, and cutover rehearsals.

Stakeholder & Governance

* Serve as the single point of accountability for release status across program leadership, business owners, and SI partners.

* Maintain the release register, change log, and decision log; produce executive dashboards and release status reports.

* Chair the Release Advisory Board (RAB) or Change Advisory Board (CAB) cadences.

* Identify, escalate, and resolve release blockers in a timely manner, broker trade-off decisions between scope, schedule, and quality.

* Partner with PMO, Solution Architects, and Business Process Owners to align release content with program objectives.

Cutover & Go-Live Management

* Develop and maintain detailed cutover plans and runbooks for each wave go-live event.

* Orchestrate dry-run/mock cutover rehearsals and document lessons learned for continuous improvement.

* Lead hypercare planning, war-room operations, and stabilization activities in the immediate post-go-live period.

* Coordinate decommissioning of legacy systems and data archival activities where applicable.

Process Improvement & Tooling

* Continuously refine release management processes, playbooks, and tooling to increase velocity and reduce risk.

* Champion Dev Ops and automation practices (CI/CD pipelines, automated testing integration, release automation tools such as SAP Cloud ALM, Solman, or third-party orchestration platforms).

* Establish metrics and KPIs for release health: deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to restore (MTTR), and cycle time.

Basic Qualifications (Must Have Skills/Experience)

* 1+ year of leadership experience (team leader, temp manager, large scale cross functional project/program management, or formal manager experience) OR completion of the Boeing internal course "Exploring Leadership."

* 10+ years of leading delivery of SAP solution development efforts including…