Lead Software Release Manager

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we're helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Lead Software Release Manager

Overview
We are seeking an experienced Software Release Manager to lead end-to-end release planning, scheduling, and orchestration across a portfolio of 7-8 interconnected software products and platforms. This role is responsible for establishing and maintaining an integrated release calendar that balances product roadmaps, engineering capacity, testing environment availability, customer commitments, regulatory requirements, and cross-program dependencies.
The ideal candidate thrives in complex enterprise environments where multiple teams, systems, and stakeholders must coordinate to successfully deliver high-quality software releases. This individual will serve as the central point of coordination for release readiness, dependency management, environment planning, and deployment execution.

Key Responsibilities
Release Planning & Scheduling
• Own the enterprise release calendar across 7-8 products and platforms.
• Develop and maintain integrated release schedules accounting for:
oDevelopment milestones
oIntegration testing windows
oPre-production validation
oPerformance and scalability testing
oProduction deployment windows
oCustomer onboarding and certification timelines
• Coordinate release trains and major program increments across multiple teams.
• Balance competing priorities while optimizing release frequency and stability.
Dependency Management
• Identify, document, track, and proactively manage:
oProduct-to-product dependencies
oProgram-to-program dependencies
oInfrastructure dependencies
oVendor and external partner dependencies
oCustomer readiness dependencies
• Facilitate dependency review forums and drive cross-functional alignment.
• Resolve schedule conflicts and escalation issues impacting release delivery.
Environment & Capacity Management
• Govern utilization of critical testing and deployment environments, including:
oIntegration environments
oSystem testing environments
oUAT environments
oPerformance testing environments
oPre-production environments
oProduction environments
• Coordinate environment reservations and conflict resolution across multiple teams.
• Ensure environment readiness, availability, and release sequencing.
Release Readiness & Governance
• Establish release entry and exit criteria.
• Conduct release readiness reviews and go/no-go assessments.
• Verify completion of:
oFunctional testing
oIntegration testing
oRegression testing
oPerformance testing
oSecurity validation
oOperational readiness activities
• Ensure change management and release governance processes are followed.
Stakeholder Coordination
• Partner closely with:
oEngineering teams
oProduct Managers
oProgram Managers
oQuality Engineering teams
oSite Reliability Engineering teams
oInfrastructure teams
oCustomer delivery teams
oOperations and Support organizations
• Communicate release plans, risks, constraints, and status to both technical and executive audiences.
• Drive alignment across globally distributed teams.
Risk & Issue Management
• Identify schedule, environment, resource, and operational risks early.
• Develop mitigation and contingency plans.
• Lead release war rooms for major deployments.
• Track and drive resolution of release blockers and critical dependencies.
Metrics & Continuous Improvement
• Define and monitor release management KPIs, including:
oRelease predictability
oOn-time delivery
oDeployment success rate
oEnvironment utilization
oDefect leakage
oChange failure rate
• Continuously improve release planning processes, tooling, and governance.

All About You
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related discipline.
• 8+ years of experience in software delivery, technical program management, release management, or engineering operations.
• 5+ years managing enterprise-scale software releases.
• Experience coordinating releases across multiple products and engineering teams simultaneously.
• Strong understanding of:
oSDLC
oAgile and Scrum methodologies
oDevOps practices
oCI/CD pipelines
oChange and release management processes
• Demonstrated experience managing complex dependency chains and cross-functional delivery programs.
• Strong project planning, organization, and risk-management skills.
• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder-management capabilities.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience in large-scale distributed systems or payment-processing platforms.
• Experience coordinating releases across globally distributed teams.
• Working knowledge of tools such as:
oJira
oAzure DevOps
oGitHub Actions
oJenkins
oXL Release / Digital.ai Release
oSplunk
oConfluence
• PMP, PMI-ACP, SAFe, ITIL, or DevOps certifications.
• Experience supporting highly regulated or mission-critical production environments.
Success Measures
A successful Software Release Manager will:
• Maintain a synchronized release schedule across 7-8 products with minimal conflicts.
• Improve release predictability and on-time delivery.
• Reduce environment contention and resource bottlenecks.
• Ensure all customer, platform, program, and infrastructure dependencies are proactively managed.
• Deliver production releases with high deployment success rates and low operational impact.
• Provide leadership visibility into release health, risks, and readiness.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard's security policies and practices;
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard's guidelines.