Release Manager

Penn State University is excited to announce an opportunity for a talented and experienced individual to join us as a Release Manager on the Enterprise Customer Relationship Management Program Team! As an enterprise implementation, this program is designed to advance engagement and service delivery for the entire university community, including faculty, students, staff, and alumni, ensuring integrated solutions that create value across all Penn State constituencies.

The Release Manager is responsible for orchestrating and streamlining the software release process across development, testing, and production environments. This role combines technical expertise in Dev Ops practices with project management skills to ensure reliable, efficient, and traceable software deployments.

Approval of remote and hybrid work is not guaranteed regardless of work location. For additional information on remote work at Penn State, see Notice to Out of State Applicants.

• Develop and maintain comprehensive release management strategy and roadmap
• Coordinate release schedules across multiple teams and projects
• Define release criteria, processes, and approval workflows
• Establish and monitor service level agreements for release activities

• Deploy and maintain enterprise Dev Ops services to streamline release management
• Enhance automation capabilities across the CI/CD pipeline
• Implement and maintain deployment automation tools and processes
• Ensure full environment traceability throughout the release lifecycle
• Serve as point of contact for the purchased devops and backup tool
• Maintain disaster recovery plans and support business continuity efforts, including monitoring and testing of backups

• Oversee development, testing, staging, and production environments
• Maintain environment configuration consistency and documentation
• Coordinate environment provisioning and capacity planning
• Monitor environment health and performance metrics

• Establish and enforce code versioning best practices
• Implement deployment methodologies and standards
• Conduct release readiness assessments and go/no-go decisions
• Manage rollback procedures and incident response protocols

• Facilitate release planning meetings and communication
• Coordinate with development, QA, operations, and business teams
• Provide release status updates to leadership and stakeholders
• Manage change control processes and documentation

Qualified candidates will demonstrate strength across several of the following areas:

Experience

• Strong background in software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes
• Experience with both waterfall and agile development methodologies
• Demonstrated experience owning end-to-end software releases through production, including coordinating complex releases across multiple technical teams, applications or work streams, and environments
• Experience coordinating releases across development, testing/UAT, staging, and production environments
• Salesforce-specific release management experience
• Experience with cloud platforms, including AWS and/or Azure
• Proficiency with Azure Dev Ops or a comparable CI/CD and release management platform

Process & Project Management

• Strong understanding of ITIL practices and change management
• Experience with project management methodologies and tools
• Experience with production change control, including release approvals, go/no-go decisions, rollback planning, and incident response
• Knowledge of risk assessment and mitigation strategies
• Understanding of compliance and regulatory requirements
• Demonstrated ability to coordinate release activities and communicate status, risks, and dependencies across…