Release Manager

Job Title: Release Manager
Contract Type: Permanent/Part time/job share
Salary Range: £45,600 - £68,400 Depending on Experience
Location: Eastleigh
Closing Date for applications: Sunday 28th April 2024

Release Manager: We have an exciting brand-new opportunity Ageas to join our dynamic IT Team as a Release Manager. If you are an experienced Leader with experience within this field and have extensive stakeholder management experience, we want to hear from you!!

As a Release Manager you will lead key aspects of release management, including planning, scheduling, communications, tracking, team coordination, deployment, and feature release. The successful candidate will work closely with teams and stakeholders across the business, IT, and InfoSec, to establish continuous release plans & delivery and implement continuous improvement practices. The primary goal is to enable stress-free release, regular releases with significant reduced incidents as a result.

Main Responsibilities as Release Manager:

• Establish and manage key Release Management practices, incorporating automation for quality alignment, readiness gates (automated or manual), and milestone decisions.
• Contribute to overall governance processes to maintain high delivery standards to customers.
• Ensure environments are available or built on time and are fit to purpose for the successful release delivery.
• Manage, mitigate, and resolve risks and issues affecting release delivery.
• Educate colleagues and teams on release management approaches through training and validation practices.
• Continuously improve the release management approach through innovation and collaboration.
• Ensure release management metrics are reported and integrated into real-time dashboards.
• Collaborate with colleagues to address challenges and issues impacting releases to customers.
• Adapt the release management framework to incorporate new techniques, technologies, and standards.

Skills and experience you need as Release Manager

• Demonstrable experience (at least 3 years) in release management for a financial services organization releasing new features and updates frequently.
• Proficient in Agile, SDLC, and DevOps practices to effectively fulfil the role, with expertise in CI/CD, particularly in Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• Experience in cloud technologies, preferably Microsoft Azure, with Azure certification considered a plus.
• Familiarity with release management tooling.
• Strong project management skills, including dependency management, team blockage removal, and risk mitigation.
• Ability to manage multiple internal stakeholders, customers, and cross-functional teams effectively.
• Strong interpersonal skills, capable of communicating effectively in both technical and business language.
• Contributions to wider organizational practice improvement and evolution.
• Knowledge and passion for new techniques to achieve release management goals, with evidence of continual improvement in the release management approach.

Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy within the Release Manager role based in Eastleigh:

At Ageas we offer a wide range of benefits to support you and your family inside and outside of work, which helped us achieve, Top Employer status in the UK.

Flexible Working - Smart Working @ Ageas gives employees flexibility around location (as long as it's within the UK) and, for many of our roles, flexibility within the working day to manage other commitments, such as school drop offs etc. We also offer all our vacancies part-time/job-shares . We also offer a minimum of 35 days holiday (inc. bank holidays) and you can buy and sell days.

Supporting your Health - Dental Insurance Health Cash Plan, Health Screening, Will Writing, Voluntary Critical Illness, Mental Health First Aiders, Well Being Activities - Yoga, Mindfulness.

Supporting your Wealth - Annual Bonus Schemes, Annual Salary Reviews, Competitive Pension, Employee Savings, Employee Loans.

Supporting you at Work - Well-being activities, yoga, mindfulness sessions, Sports and Social Club events and more.

Supporting you and your Family - Maternity/pregnant parent/primary adopter entitlement of 16 weeks' at full pay and paternity/non-pregnant parent/co-adopter at 8 weeks' full pay.

Benefits for Them - Partner Life Assurance and Critical Illness cover

Getting Around - Car Salary Exchange, Cycle Scheme, Vehicle Breakdown Cover

Get some Tech - Deals on various gadgets including Wearables, Tablets and Laptops.

Supporting you back to work - Return to work programme after maternity leave

About Ageas:
We're one of the largest car and home insurers in the UK. Our people help Ageas to be a thriving, creative and innovative place to work, which is echoed in the service we provide to over four million customers.
As an inclusive employer, we encourage anyone to apply. We're a signatory of the Race at Work Charter and Women in Finance Charter, a Stonewall diversity champion and a Disability Confident Employer (which means interviews are guaranteed for applicants with a disability who meet the minimum role criteria). For more information please see Ageas Everyone.
Our aim is to have great people everywhere in our business and we're always looking for outstanding people to join us. Most roles across Ageas allow a proportion of your time to be spent working from home and we're open to discussing flexible working, including full-time, part-time or job share arrangements.
To find out more about Ageas, see About Us.