Job Description
Business Function
Group Technology enables and empowers the bank with an efficient, nimble, and resilient infrastructure through a strategic focus on productivity, quality & control, technology, people capability, and innovation. In Group Technology we manage the majority of the Bank's operational processes and inspire to delight our business partners through our multiple banking delivery channels.
Job Purpose:
The Release Manager is responsible for the end‑to‑end governance of testing environments, driving continuous improvement of tools and methods supporting testing process. The role also ensures structured software release execution and effective coordination across change owners to manage risks prior to production deployment.
Accountabilities include, but are not limited to:
- Provisioning comprehensive test environments supporting the testing process
- Well‑planned and well‑coordinated cutover events for complex changes
- Ensuring test data is properly masked or generated to maintain information secrecy
- Defining governance rules for testing environments and driving their adoption
- Identifying, adopting, and implementing innovative tools and methods that support testing and software releases
Responsibilities
Oversee the design, planning, provisioning, and maintenance of pre‑production testing environments, ensuring they are stable, production‑representative, and supported with comprehensively masked test data.
- Establish, communicate, and enforce governance and ground rules for the proper and consistent utilization of testing environments across all application teams.
- Coordinate environment‑wide operational events, including data refreshes, batch processing windows, deployment windows, and other activities that impact testing readiness or test schedules.
- Prevent, detect, and resolve defects and issues related to test environments, ensuring high environment stability, reducing environment‑caused test failures, and enabling seamless test execution.
- Define, enhance, and operate the Release Management Command Centre, ensuring structured, transparent, and well‑governed execution of release and cutover activities.
- Design, improve, and implement tools, frameworks, and processes that strengthen the testing ecosystem, improve environment reliability, and enhance the overall testing and release lifecycle.
- Facilitate cross‑team coordination among change owners, ensuring complete dependency tracking, alignment of release timelines, and effective risk assessment prior to promoting changes to production.
- Act as the central liaison between working teams and governance bodies such as Change Management, Infrastructure, Security, and other relevant stakeholders to ensure compliance with internal standards, processes, and controls.
- For complex cutovers, own the end‑to‑end planning and execution, including runbook creation, communication management, and securing of auditable artefacts for key decisions and activities.
- Ensure all activities supporting testing environments and releases are executed with a focus on quality, operational excellence, risk reduction, and continuous improvement.
Requirements
- Technical breadth (platforms & architectures): Demonstrated hands‑on knowledge spanning mainframe technologies and applications, open systems (Linux/UNIX/Windows), containerized and cloud‑native platforms, and service‑mesh–based architectures across hybrid setups.
- At least 5+ years in release management in large, mission‑critical environments.
- Environment provisioning: Proven experience provisioning and operating technical testing and production environments across multiple countries.
- Cloud & integration stack: Working knowledge of OpenShift/Kubernetes, APIs, event streaming/queues (Kafka), networking (VPC, GTM), and related integration patterns.
- Observability & reliability: Hands‑on experience with infrastructure and application observability (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Grafana/Kibana, AppDynamics) and familiarity with SRE principles (performance, reliability, monitoring, alerting).
- Delivery toolchain: Practical knowledge of CI/CD tools and flow mechanisms, and other supporting engineering processes enabling repeatable, well‑governed releases.
- Data and caching: Understanding of API management, queue handling, and caching techniques (e.g., Kafka topics/streams, Redis).
- Banking domain knowledge: Understanding of critical banking processes, including origination, transactions, servicing, and advisory, and how release and environment decisions impact these value streams.
- Stakeholder communication: Ability to communicate effectively with senior IT and business stakeholders, articulating risks, dependencies, cutover approaches, and go/no‑go criteria
Apply Now
We offer a competitive salary and benefits package and the professional advantages of a dynamic environment that supports your development and recognises your achievement.
