Senior Manager, Software Product & Release Operations

Aurora’s mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. The Aurora Driver will create a new era in mobility and logistics, one that will bring a safer, more efficient, and more accessible future to everyone. At Aurora, you will tackle massively complex problems alongside other passionate, intelligent individuals, growing as an expert while expanding your knowledge.

For the latest news from Aurora, visit aurora.tech or follow us on Linked In. Aurora’s Product Operations team is at the fore-front of technology, providing partnership to product, operations & engineering and ensuring commercial operations capabilities are delivered on time, safely and efficiently. Within Product Operations, our Software Product & Release Operations function owns the release cadence and readiness of everything Aurora ships in software - closing the gap between engineering roadmaps and operational readiness, not just reporting on it.

• Own Enterprise-Wide Customer and Operations Release Strategy:
  Own and evolve the overarching operations release strategy across software, autonomous systems, and fleet operations, ensuring our release and rollout framework scales seamlessly with business and fleet growth.
• Define Release Operational readiness & risk Governance:
  Define and institute company-wide release readiness and risk gating standards, serving as the accountable authority for the evaluation framework leadership relies on to clear commercial deployments.
• Drive Cross-Functional Capability Roadmap Alignment:
  Partner directly with VP and Director-level leaders across Engineering, Product, and Commercial Operations to align multi-year capability roadmaps with commercial and business GTM expansion targets.
• Unify Multi-System Releases:
  Unify release governance across complex, interdependent software, hardware, and platform changes—resolving top-level trade-offs and cross-departmental dependencies when release timelines conflict with operational readiness
• Establish Customer & Operations Release & Health Metrics:
  Define, own, and report on enterprise release predictability, defect escape metrics, and roadmap-to-readiness lead times for executive leadership.
• Manage Feature & Defect Escalation Frameworks:
  Standardize backlog hygiene and defect escalation pathways across the software and operational release pipelines, ensuring systemic feedback loops exist between field performance and engineering.
• Own the Software Release and change Management Cycle:
  Own and evolve the overall release strategy across autonomous operations. Spanning across the entire software release cycle, from build readiness through rollout, in partnership with Software Engineering.
• Manage Feature and Bug Tracking:
  Own backlog hygiene and defect escalation paths across the software release pipeline, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks between Engineering and Operations.
• Coordinate on Mixed Releases:
  Partner with Product Ops & Platform Enablement on releases that span both software and hardware/platform changes, deferring Go/No-Go authority to them for the hardware/platform components.
• Drive Release Metrics:
  Own and report on release predictability, defect escape rate, and roadmap-to-readiness lead time.

• 7+ years of experience in program/product operations, technical program management, or release management, ideally in a software-driven environment with adjacent hardware dependencies (automotive, robotics, or similar)
• Demonstrated experience owning a software release cycle end-to-end, including build readiness, rollout, and defect management
• Proven track record of building or improving feature and bug tracking systems and processes at scale
• Strong…