Release Manager

About Us

Halfords is on a journey - building the future of motoring and cycling and looking for people who want to help shape what comes next. We’re a place for cocreators: people who want to make a real impact, take ownership and be part of something that’s still evolving.

Halfords is on a journey - building the future of motoring and cycling and looking for people who want to help shape what comes next. We’re a place for cocreators: people who want to make a real impact, take ownership and be part of something that’s still evolving.

Technology at Halfords is at a turning point. We’re modernising our foundations, sharpening our delivery, and ensuring every technology decision is connected to real commercial and customer outcomes.

We're looking for people who act as trusted advisors to the business, take end-to-end accountability for outcomes, and can balance pace with long‑term architectural integrity. Innovation here means practical, scalable solutions, not ideas that stay on whiteboards.

Join us as a Change & Release Manager and play a pivotal role in helping Halfords deliver technology change safely, efficiently and at pace across a complex, fast‑moving retail environment. Working at the heart of our Service & Operations team, you’ll lead the governance, coordination and continuous improvement of our change and release processes, ensuring new technology, platform updates and service enhancements are introduced seamlessly with minimal disruption to colleagues and customers.

This is an exciting opportunity to influence how technology change is delivered across the business. You’ll collaborate with teams across Technology and the wider organisation to assess risk, manage release schedules and champion a modern change enablement approach that balances strong operational control with agility and innovation. If you’re passionate about driving continuous improvement, reducing process friction and enabling high‑quality technology delivery in a 24/7 environment, we’d love to hear from you.

• Own and evolve the organisation’s Change Management framework, ensuring technology changes are assessed, prioritised and delivered with the right level of governance, control and risk management.
• Coordinate release planning across technology teams, ensuring changes are scheduled effectively to minimise operational risk and service disruption.
• Champion safe, efficient technology delivery by embedding change processes that support modern ways of working while maintaining appropriate operational oversight.
• Lead change governance activities, facilitating advisory forums and ensuring risks, dependencies and operational readiness are clearly understood and managed.
• Provide clear and timely communication of planned changes and releases, giving stakeholders visibility of upcoming activities and potential business impacts.
• Drive operational readiness for technology releases, ensuring new and enhanced capabilities are supported through appropriate testing, validation and cross‑functional coordination.
• Monitor and report on change performance, analysing success rates, failed changes and service impacts to identify trends and continuous improvement opportunities.
• Work closely with Service Assurance, Incident & Resilience, Engineering and Delivery teams to ensure changes are introduced safely and lessons learned are embedded into future processes.
• Continually improve change and release practices, reducing unnecessary complexity and process friction while maintaining service stability in a fast‑paced 24/7 environment.
• Act as a trusted subject matter expert, promoting best practice and fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement across Technology and the wider business.

• Proven experience managing technology change and release processes within complex enterprise environments.
• Strong understanding of modern change management practices, balancing effective risk management with fast, efficient delivery.
• Experience coordinating releases across multiple teams, technologies and platforms.
• Skilled at assessing and managing operational risk, ensuring service…