Release Manager SME

Outstanding opportunity supporting emerging technology initiatives, including AI, for a major federal agency!
This is a hybrid role - 3 days a week onsite and requires an active TS/SCI clearance

Salary range: $130,000-$200,000

The Release Engineer SME is the senior release engineering specialist responsible for architecting and managing end-to-end software release pipelines across Development, Integration, Staging, and Production environments. This role designs CI/CD-driven delivery workflows, defines release governance, and ensures deployments are reliable, repeatable, and auditable for mission-critical applications in a highly regulated government setting. The SME partners with development, QA, operations, and security stakeholders to continuously improve release processes, reduce risk, and adopt modern DevOps and site reliability practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and manage end-to-end release pipelines using CI/CD platforms, scripting, and automation to orchestrate builds, tests, and deployments across multiple environments.
• Define and enforce release governance, including change controls, versioning conventions, release windows, and approval workflows suitable for mission-critical and highly regulated systems.
• Coordinate cross-functional release activities with development, QA, operations, and security teams, ensuring dependencies are managed and release content is fully validated before production deployment.
• Implement and maintain rollback, hotfix, and emergency release procedures that minimize downtime and risk while supporting strict service-level and compliance requirements.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive release documentation, including deployment procedures, configuration baselines, release notes, and environment inventories to support repeatability and auditability.
• Monitor application and environment health during and after releases using logging, metrics, and observability tools to quickly identify and remediate deployment-related issues.
• Optimize build and deployment processes by identifying bottlenecks, introducing automation, and aligning tooling and practices with DevOps and site reliability engineering principles.
• Assure compatibility and configuration integrity of software across target platforms, environments, and dependencies, including infrastructure-as-code and containerized workloads where applicable.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• Typically 10-15 years of experience in software engineering or DevOps with extensive focus on release management and production deployments in complex, regulated environments.
• Demonstrated expertise architecting and operating CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes for multi-tier, mission-critical applications.
• Experience defining and enforcing release governance, including change management, version control strategies, and production readiness criteria.
• Strong background with modern release and deployment patterns such as blue-green, canary, and progressive delivery, as applicable to the environment.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms and related release automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with DevOps and SRE practices, including reliability engineering, observability, and resilience patterns for production systems.
• Relevant certifications in DevOps, cloud platforms, or CI/CD tooling that demonstrate advanced release engineering expertise.
• Experience supporting large-scale, distributed applications leveraging infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes).

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