Release Manager at American College of Financial Services

Job description

The Release Manager plays a critical role responsible for establishing and governing enterprise-wide release management across the organization’s technology ecosystem, including Salesforce and multiple web platforms. This role will build and enforce standardized release processes, governance, and controls to ensure consistent, secure, and high-quality deployments. The Release Manager will oversee release planning and execution, manage cross-system dependencies, and ensure all releases meet defined quality, security, and readiness standards. Serving as the central point of coordination across application development, web development, QA, security, and business stakeholders, this role is instrumental in driving release discipline, reducing operational risk, and advancing overall delivery maturity. The ideal candidate is highly detail-oriented, organized, and experienced in managing complex, multi-system releases in fast-paced, Agile environments. Organization Role This is a full-time position reporting to the Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Applications & Web Development. The Release Manager will act as the central authority for release coordination and governance across enterprise systems and web platforms. This role partners closely with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment, minimize risk, and maintain consistency and control in deployment practices. Job Scope & Expected Contributions The Release Manager is responsible for establishing, operationalizing, and continuously improving a centralized release management function across enterprise applications and web platforms. This role spans multiple systems, teams, and technologies, including Salesforce and the organization’s web ecosystem. Scope of Responsibility Own the end-to-end release process across all environments (Development, QA, UAT, Staging, and Production) for Salesforce (Education Cloud, Marketing Cloud Next, and Data Cloud) and enterprise web applications. Manage Salesforce DevOps Center processes, including work items, deployment pipelines, environment strategy, and GitHub source control. Ensure releases follow established change management processes and support appropriate segregation of duties. Coordinate releases across multiple systems, including Salesforce, integrations, web applications, APIs, authentication services, and supporting platforms to ensure dependencies are identified and deployments remain aligned. Maintain the enterprise release calendar, coordinating release schedules, code freezes, blackout periods, and deployment activities across teams and business stakeholders. Ensure release readiness by verifying testing has been completed, approvals have been obtained, environments are healthy, and deployment and rollback plans are documented prior to production releases. Partner with Information Security to ensure releases meet security, compliance, and access management requirements, including audit readiness and adherence to least-privilege principles. Lead release execution, including facilitating go/no-go decisions, coordinating rollback activities when necessary, and driving post-release reviews and continuous improvement efforts. Develop and maintain release management documentation, including deployment runbooks, environment documentation, governance standards, approval matrices, and operational procedures. Expected Contributions Build and Mature the Release Function: Establish a scalable, internal release management capability with clear governance and accountability Improve Release Quality and Predictability: Reduce production defects, failed deployments, and rollbacks through strong process discipline and readiness validation Enhance Cross-Team Coordination: Serve as the central point of alignment across development, QA, DevOps, security, and business stakeholders Reduce Operational Risk: Proactively identify and mitigate release risks across a complex, integrated environment Standardize and Scale Processes: Replace ad h