Release Mgr - SAP Platform

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee‑centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed.

This is an environment unlike anything in the high‑tech world and the secret of Costco’s success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy.

The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.

Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast‑paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.

Release Managers are responsible for the release lifecycle. This includes the planning, scheduling, coordinating, and overall management of the software build process through the different stages within Costco’s delivery lifecycle. Release Managers are responsible for creating detailed integrated release plans across several products and dependencies, for improving the software build process, and for optimizing the release pipeline. Release Managers build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, team members, and peers and are responsible for communicating release expectations and statuses across value streams, program stakeholders, and impacted users.

The SAP Platform Release Manager manages and orchestrates the cross‑organizational efforts required to introduce applications, infrastructure, and middleware changes into both the non‑production and production environments. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for ensuring all capabilities required to package changes for delivery to users are in place, while maintaining the integrity and availability of the existing system. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for setting and communicating release expectations across all involved teams and impacted users.

* This position will be filled onsite in Issaquah, WA, Chicago, IL, or Dallas, TX.

• Manages, organizes, and directs work for building and maintaining software, and infrastructure releases for their promotion through a series of non‑production SAP landscapes, and leading to a production environment deployment.
• Manages, organizes, and directs releases that comprise of cross‑functional teams, and a multitude of interrelated and independent application and/or infrastructure changes.
• Manages and drives deployment risk mitigation practices (i.e., back out/contingency planning) for the duration of the release cycle to ensure an organized and successful deployment.
• Develops and stewards the Release Management process, along with establishing specific standards to govern the process.
• Creates deployment plans in Smartsheets, and ensures dependencies are identified and managed accordingly.
• Coordinates/consumes production releases, support packs, retro‑fits, and changes from all projects within the program landscape.
• Ensures strategies are developed for effectively managing change across the solution landscape and platform.
• Establishes and communicates release expectations, milestones, and release activity progress across all involved teams.
• Provides reports for and across all involved teams.
• Develops and maintains a release management discipline based on experience, best practices, and proven methodologies.
• Facilitates planning and documentation of rollback strategies, hypercare support, and handoff to production support teams.
• Facilitates the execution of mock and production cutovers.
• Conducts release readiness reviews, kick‑offs, deployment planning meetings, and Go/No‑Go meetings.
• Creates and owns a lessons learned document and drives change to continually…