Director, Release Management & Delivery Governance CalSAWS

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Careers – The home of CalSAWS Recruitment Announcement:

Are you an experienced enterprise delivery leader who thrives in complex, multi-vendor environments? Do you have the discipline and executive presence to enforce readiness, govern release standards, and ensure safe, predictable deployments across large-scale public systems? Are you ready to help CalSAWS and Benefits Cal ship critical technology safely and transparently to all 58 California counties?

If so, CalSAWS invites you to apply today to join our team as the next Director, Release Management & Delivery Governance!

The Director, Release Management & Delivery Governance owns enterprise-wide release management and delivery governance to ensure CalSAWS and Benefits Cal ship safely, predictably, and transparently. This role establishes and enforces consistent readiness gates, evidence standards, deployment discipline, and post-release learning across multiple projects and vendors.

This position owns the downstream release efforts including: release calendar management, packaging of deliverables across projects, readiness gating, go/no-go discipline, cutover orchestration, stabilization planning, and release metrics.

Releases serve as deployment vehicles that include deliverables from multiple projects. The Director partners closely with the Project Delivery Office (PDO) to ensure project-to-release traceability, dependency visibility, and decision transparency.

• Owning the enterprise release calendar, deployment windows, freeze periods, and release communications standards
• Defining and enforcing readiness gates, including:
  • Entry and exit criteria
  • System testing completion
  • County validation/UAT sign-off
  • Evidence packages and defect thresholds
  • Rollback readiness and operational runbooks
  • Training and communications readiness
• Packaging release scope across multiple projects and ensuring traceability to accountable project owners and intended outcomes
• Leading go/no-go governance processes and cutover orchestration
• Ensuring stabilization windows are planned, staffed, and supported
• Establishing and governing an emergency change path with clear criteria and required evidence
• Driving release quality and stability metrics (e.g., success rate, defect leakage, emergency fixes, change failure rate)
• Leading post-implementation reviews (PIRs) and continuous improvement efforts with measurable corrective actions
• Partnering with CIO delivery leaders to ensure vendor accountability for readiness artifacts, quality standards, and corrective actions
• Ensuring consistent release governance standards across CalSAWS and Benefits Cal, even where release trains or cadences differ

• Bring senior leadership experience in release management, service delivery governance, or large-scale enterprise software development life cycle (SDLC) governance
• Demonstrate the ability to implement and enforce readiness gates and go/no-go discipline across multiple vendors and teams
• Have strong metrics orientation with experience driving quality, stability, and change success improvements
• Excel at executive communication, escalation management, and evidence-based decision making
• Be able to hold firm on governance standards while maintaining trust and forward momentum
• Possess a general understanding of California’s welfare landscape and the county-administered service delivery model
• Be motivated by delivering predictable, transparent, and high-quality releases that support public service continuity

All positions may be subject to some short‑term travel in order to conduct project business with the State and counties. The CalSAWS project office is currently located in Gold River, California.

• Publish/confirm enterprise release calendar and standard readiness gate framework; socialize with vendors and internal teams (CalSAWS + Benefits Cal).
• Implement project-to-release traceability approach with PDO (minimum viable traceability) and pilot on the next two release cycles.
• Define go/no-go package template, cutover/stabilization checklist, and emergency change criteria; run at least one release…