Principal Software Engineer - Release Manager

Job Title – Principal Engineer The Purpose of This Role As a Release engineer, you are responsible for driving successful planning, coordination, and delivery of releases across multiple technology platforms. This role works closely with Product Management, Engineering, Architecture, and Operations teams to ensure predictable, high‑quality releases while fostering transparent, data‑driven decision making. The release engineer will play a critical role in establishing and continuously improving release readiness, quality standards, and operational excellence, with a strong emphasis on cloud‑native delivery and AWS best practices. You will drive improvements to the release process over time, should drive automation, reduce risk and effort on releases over time, ensuring the right metrics and reporting is put in place. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to innovate and optimize cloud strategies, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and excellence. Your role will also involve coordination with multiple teams, promoting best practices, and staying abreast of emerging technologies to maintain our competitive edge. The Value You Deliver Value You Deliver: As a release engineer, you will be accountable for how and when the platform releases, not what features are built. The role focuses on: Release predictability Readiness and quality Cross team coordination Transparent, data driven decision making Release automation and risk reduction The Core responsibilities for this role Release Planning & Predictability Owns and maintains the platform release calendar Drives releases across multiple platforms Defines and communicates release milestones (code freeze, test complete, release date) Ensures release dates are explicit, visible, and realistic Manages late scope changes and clearly communicates impact Ensure relevant metrics and reporting mechanisms are in place for every release Release Readiness & Quality Defines and enforces release‑level readiness criteria , including: Testing completeness (automated and manual where applicable) Security and compliance checks Documentation and consumer‑facing communication Continuously assesses readiness across all participating teams Drives improvements of the release process, should focus on automation and reducing risk and effort Identifies risks early and drives mitigation while there is still time to act Go / No‑Go Signal Leads structured release readiness reviews Presents objective readiness signals based on data and recommends go-nogo to leadership Escalates unresolved risks with context and recommended actions Cross‑Team Coordination Acts as the single coordination point across: Platform development squads Platform management & infrastructure teams Security, compliance, and operations Makes dependencies and assumptions visible Reduces late surprises caused by misalignment or unclear ownership Aligns functional releases with platform management activities Owns the Production Release Assessment (PRA) process where applicable Communication & Transparency Ensures consistent release communication to: Platform customers (producer and consumer app teams) Support and operations teams Platform leadership Publishes concise release summaries covering: Included capabilities Known risks or limitations Consumer impact (especially breaking or behavior‑changing changes) Continuous Improvement Captures release learnings and recurring patterns Tracks release health indicators: Late scope changes Release date slippage Post‑release defects or incidents Drives improvements to the release process over time Technical Cloud Experience: Working knowledge in AWS and various services such as EKS, S3, DynamoDB, EC2, Route 53, Lambda, PostgreSQL etc. Kubernetes Experience: Knowledge in designing scalable and robust systems on Kubernetes, preferably EKS. DevOps Knowledge: Understanding of Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, CI/CD, and other DevOps practices API