Release Manager, IT Program Management

Your opportunity

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us “challenge the status quo” and transform the finance industry together. We believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s). Schwab Technology Services enables the future of how clients manage their money by providing innovative and reliable technology products and services as a part of our ongoing commitment to democratize access to investing and financial planning.

This position will be part of Sales, Services and Marketing Technology (SSMT) building and managing Schwab Representative facing technologies.  The Manager – IT Program Management (Release Manager role) will be managing releases for the SSMT organization, working with all members of the scrum teams, leaders, Product Owners, and other technology groups to plan, organize, prepare, and execute releases, ensuring that all compliance aspects are met and risk is reduced to the production environment.  The ideal candidate will be organized, forward looking, a critical thinker, and will lead the teams to ensure software releases will be successful.  This is an Individual Contributor role.

What you have

• 3 to 5 years working in an IT enterprise software organization.
• 3+ years’ experience in managing releases for complex and critical applications. A key role of this resource will be to lead teams through the Release Process: Ability to Define deployment plans, identify deployment dependencies, define deployment timelines for releases.
• Solid track record in an operational/support role with emphasis on protecting the production environment with appropriate controls as needed to maintain high availability.
• Planning, managing, and executing release cycles, including tracking release deliverables, coordinating quality processes (business certification, QA signoffs, governance approvals, and analysis from code quality tools), and leading release efforts in the production environment.
• Creating requests for change and obtaining appropriate approvals, including approvals from the governing bodies and risk management groups.
• Understanding a complex system of applications and coordinating dependencies between teams and systems for project or feature deliverables.
• Contributing to process improvements for the release management process and maintaining documentation of all release processes.
• Working closely with CI/CD engineers and development teams to improve deployment automation.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills required for composing and communicating to all the partners involved, including providing clear, concise, and timely communication to all parties before, during and after deployments.
• Experience working with Change Management tools (Remedy) for tracking the production changes.
• Experience documenting and improving processes around Release Management best practices.
• Ability to work a flexible schedule, including multiple evenings per month for release night implementations.
• Knowledge of BMC Remedy, Jira, Confluence and Clarity preferred.
• Interpersonal, negotiation, facilitation, analytical, problem-solving, influencing, prioritization, decision- making and conflict resolution skills.
• Strong ownership mentality with a focus on customer satisfaction. Ability to partner with Scrum Masters / Developers / Production owners during the release management process.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Knowledge of advanced release strategy concepts a plus (blue/green deployments, auto-tagging, versioning strategy, automation).
• Knowledge of Agile methodologies and DevOps practices preferred.
• Understanding of CI/CD tools in a cloud environment preferred (GitHub, Copado, Bamboo, Jenkins, Bitbucket, etc.).

In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.