Senior Manager of Release Train Engineering

Lumen is the trusted network for the AI‑powered world, connecting people, data, and applications through our expansive fiber network and connected ecosystem. We enable secure, high‑performance connectivity across cloud, edge, and AI workloads for enterprises, governments, and communities.

At Lumen, you’ll work on infrastructure customers rely on today and build for what’s next, where performance, security, and resilience matter.

This is a high accountability environment where bold ideas drive real innovation for our customers, partners, and industry. The work is challenging, expectations are clear, and trust is built into how we operate. If you’re ready to take ownership, deliver meaningful impact, and help shape the future of AI‑ready connectivity, join us today.

The Senior Manager of Release Train Engineers is a people and delivery-operations leader responsible for managing Release Train Engineers (RTEs) and Senior Release Train Engineers (Sr. RTEs) within Lumen’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This role ensures Agile Release Train execution operates with consistent standards, clear accountability, strong coaching, measurable impact, continuous optimization, including AI agentic leverage across complex technology initiatives and Agile Release Trains.

This leader builds and manages a high-performing RTE organization, aligns ART execution practices across the portfolio, improves delivery transparency, strengthens escalation discipline, and ensures teams focus on outcomes, flow, predictability, risk and dependency management, and relentless improvement. The role partners closely with TPMO leadership, Product, Engineering, Architecture, Business Owners, and portfolio stakeholders to ensure ART execution supports business priorities and enterprise outcomes.

The leader also identifies opportunities to optimize delivery systems through intelligent automation, AI-enabled workflows, experimentation, and agentic approaches that augment planning, coordination, decision‑making, and continuous improvement.

This is a remote opportunity open to candidates located anywhere in the U.S.

• People Leadership:
  Manage, coach, develop, and evaluate RTEs and Sr. RTEs; set expectations, provide feedback, support career growth, and ensure the team operates with clear priorities, role clarity, and accountability.

• RTE Operating Model Ownership:
  Define and maintain standards, playbooks, templates, dashboards, cadence expectations, governance routines, and escalation models for ART execution.

• Portfolio Execution Alignment:
  Align RTE and Sr. RTE work with business priorities, PI planning calendars, portfolio objectives, product roadmaps, delivery commitments, and leadership expectations.

• Risk, Dependency & Escalation Governance:
  Establish consistent methods for managing ART risks, impediments, dependencies, escalation paths, accountability, and executive visibility.

• Metrics & Performance Management:
  Monitor ART health, RTE effectiveness, predictability, flow metrics, milestone confidence, dependency trends, and operating-model adoption. Use insights to drive improvement actions.

• Optimization & Agentic Creativity:
  Continuously improve ART operating models using systems thinking, Lean-Agile practices, experimentation, intelligent automation, and agentic AI. Encourage RTEs to develop innovative, responsible approaches that reduce administrative effort, improve decision quality, accelerate issue resolution, and strengthen delivery outcomes.

• Stakeholder Leadership:
  Partner with senior Product, Engineering, Architecture, TPMO, Operations, and business leaders to resolve delivery issues, clarify ownership, improve planning quality, and strengthen cross-functional execution.