Release Planning Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Job Duties:

Release Planning & Coordination

• Organize and lead effective release planning meetings, ensuring cross-functional alignment across application, infrastructure, and cloud teams.

• Define and maintain a structured release calendar for applications and infrastructure, including OS patching, cloud deployments, middleware upgrades, and security updates.

• Establish a consistent and predictable release cadence across IT applications, cloud platforms, and infrastructure components.

Release Execution & Governance

• Manage end-to-end infrastructure/application release cycles, coordinating on-premises and/or cloud environments to minimize disruptions.

• Ensure adherence to enterprise IT policies and security standards while executing application and infrastructure releases.

• Track release deliverables, security compliance checks, and functional/security test approvals, ensuring production readiness.

• Monitor infrastructure changes, including system upgrades, network modifications, storage enhancements, and patching cycles.

• Provide oversight for OS patching, covering major and minor updates for Windows, Linux along with firmware updates for storage and network CIs and other enterprise systems.

Cloud & Automation Integration (Preferred)

• Oversee cloud infrastructure deployments - Azure, ensuring successful configuration and validation.

• Collaborate with DevOps and IT System Reliability teams to integrate automated release pipelines, CI/CD best practices, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies.

• Utilize IT automation tools (Ansible, Terraform) for infrastructure provisioning and release management.

Security & Compliance

• Ensure infrastructure releases comply with security policies and CIP regulatory requirements.

Performance Monitoring & Continuous Improvement

• Track and report key release performance metrics, including patch deployment success rates, release cycle efficiency, system downtime, and rollback trends.

• Facilitate root cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortem reviews for failed or delayed releases, driving process improvements.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Act as a liaison between development, operations, cloud, and security teams to optimize infrastructure release management.

• Provide support to the Change Advisory Board (CAB), ensuring infrastructure changes are properly assessed and documented.

• Manage cross-functional dependencies for application and infrastructure releases, maintaining up-to-date documentation.

Jira/ServiceNow & ITSM Integration

• Utilize Jira/ServiceNow to manage release workflows, change approvals, and infrastructure deployment tracking.

• Support ITSM processes, including Change, Release, Incident, and Problem Management.

CI/CD Pipeline & Release Automation

• Design, build, and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines for application and infrastructure delivery across all supported technology stacks.

• Integrate automated risk scoring, readiness checks, and quality gates into release orchestration workflows.

• Automate RFC and change record creation in ITSM platforms upon release readiness, supporting risk-based change classification.

• Implement and maintain break-glass emergency deployment controls with full audit logging and traceability.

• Establish and track software delivery performance metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and report results to leadership.

• Contribute to the evolution of release orchestration tooling, including rule-based and AI-augmented deployment decision frameworks.

Qualifications:

Work Experience (Mandatory)

• Sr level: Requires minimum 5 years job related work experience in excess of degree requirements.

• Lead: Requires minimum 8 years job related work experience in excess of degree requirements

• Minimum 3 years of experience in IT Change & Release Management, specifically for infrastructure releases (OS patching, security updates, cloud deployments, and system upgrades).

• Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience designing, building, or managing CI/CD pipelines for application and/or infrastructure delivery across multi-stack environments.

• Minimum 5 years of progressively responsible experience in system integration, infrastructure release management, or IT operations - with demonstrated ownership of end-to-end release lifecycle execution.

• Strong knowledge of ITIL best practices for Change, Release, Incident, and Problem Management, including risk-based change classification (Standard, Normal, and Emergency changes).

• Demonstrated experience implementing or operating release governance frameworks, including automated quality gates, readiness checks, and deployment approval workflows within CI/CD pipelines.

• Demonstrated Experience of automated deployment strategies such as blue/green, canary, or rolling deployments and when to apply each in a production environment.

• Demonstrated Experience integrating CI/CD pipelines with ITSM platforms (ServiceNow or equivalent) for automated change record creation, approval routing, and release traceability.

• Familiarity with database/databricks/cloud applications change management practices, including version-controlled schema migrations and automated rollback strategies within release pipelines.

• Experience tracking and reporting software delivery performance metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery) to drive continuous improvement.

Certifications (Preferred)

• ITIL v4 Certification (Highly Preferred).

• Cloud Certification Azure is a plus.

• Certified OpenShift Administrator or similar infrastructure-related certification is a plus.

Technical Expertise (Preferred)

• Experience with ServiceNow for managing release and infrastructure deployment workflows.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure release management, including server patching, database updates, cloud infrastructure rollouts, and network changes.

• Working knowledge of IT automation tools (Ansible, Terraform) for infrastructure provisioning and release management.

• Experience with DevOps & CI/CD pipelines to automate application release processes.

• Familiarity with SQL, scripting languages (Python, Shell, PowerShell), and data analysis is a plus.

ERCOT is firmly committed to equal employment for all qualified persons without regard to race, sex, medical condition, religion, age, creed, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, ancestry, veteran status, genetic information or any other protected category under federal, state or local law.

Expected Salary Range: