Release Manager/ Cloud Engineering

Working hours 4am - 2 pm CET. Over 1.5 million customers and more than a billion people in over 180 countries use client’s solutions to accelerate the process of doing business and simplify people's lives. With this product the client unleashes business-critical data that is trapped inside of documents. Role Summary: As a Release Management contractor, you will be a release enabler for client’s core services, coordinating cross-team release activities across environments and products. You will own the operational lifecycle of releases - from calendar planning and release readiness through execution, validation, and post-release follow-up - ensuring changes ship safely, predictably, and in compliance with client’s change-management and audit standards. You will partner closely with Engineering, SRE, the Operations Center, Incident Command, Security, and Product to minimize release risk while improving velocity and automation, acting as a primary contact for release status, blockers, and hot-patch decisioning during your coverage window. Responsibilities: Coordinate release planning and calendars for core products.Run end-to-end release processes and weekly patches: track builds through environments, ensuring all gates and approvals are met before promotion.Own and facilitate Go/No-Go processes for major releases occurring within the coverage window: prepare status, verify test results, highlight risks, and record Go/No-Go outcomes and follow-ups.Create and manage Release Authorizations (RA) and related artifacts to meet compliance and audit requirements.Partner with the DOC team to sequence and monitor deployments across regions and sites. Ensure pre-deployment checks are completed, support troubleshooting of failed deployment jobs where RM is accountable.Enforce change-management and business-hours policies during off-hours, including No-Fly/moratorium periods, emergency change exceptions, and adherence to defined patch and hot-patch criteria.Drive late-merge and hot-patch governance.Maintain and improve release observability: partner with Engineering/SRE to evolve RM dashboards, status views, and metrics showing release readiness, deployment progress, and risk across services and environments.Support post-release quality by coordinating validation evidence.Support root-cause and post-mortem work for release-related incidents and deployment regressions.Communicate clearly and proactively: provide concise release status, risk, and impact summaries to engineering leaders, incident commanders, and DOC, and ensure release email updates and stakeholder notifications are timely and accurate. Requirements: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.3+ years of experience in Release Management, Program/Project Management, SRE/DevOps, or Technical Operations supporting production software releases.Experience managing multi-environment release pipelines (e.g., development, demo, production, regulated environments) with formal gates and approvals.Hands-on experience with Jira (or equivalent) for driving release epics/stories, change records, and cross-team work tracking.Familiarity with CI/CD and deployment tooling such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GoCD, or equivalent release automation pipelines.Strong understanding of SDLC and change-management controls (CAB, change types, rollback planning, audit evidence) in a SaaS or enterprise environment.Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional stakeholders (Engineering, SRE, Security, Product) under time pressure and drive to clear decisions.Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability to summarize complex technical risk and status for non-technical stakeholders.Ability and willingness to work the 7:00 PM – 4:00 AM PST coverage window reliably, acting as the primary Release Management contact during those hours. Preferred Qualifications: Experience running releases for large distributed systems or multi-product platforms.Experience with observability and validation tooling such as Kusto, Grafana or equivalent for data-driven Go/No-Go decisions.Background in or close partnership with operations/SRE teams, including exposure to incident response and post-mortem practices.Experience contributing to or leading release-process transformation efforts (e.g., increased automation, dashboarding and metrics).Comfort working with SQL/DBA partners and understanding database deployment considerations as part of coordinated releases. We offer*: Flexible working format - remote, office-based or flexibleA competitive salary and good compensation packagePersonalized career growthProfessional development tools (mentorship program, tech talks and trainings, centers of excellence, and more)Active tech communities with regular knowledge sharingEducation reimbursementMemorable anniversary presentsCorporate events and team buildingsOther location-specific benefitsnot applicable for freelancers