Senior Release Manager

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +2 more states.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the comprehensive release process for the robot platform, collaborating with software, firmware, hardware, and field operations teams.

• Determine the release scope, objectives, timelines, entry and exit criteria, and conduct release readiness evaluations.

• Organize and oversee release schedules for robot software, firmware, and cloud services, which encompass major, minor, patch, and hotfix releases.

• Manage the release cadence to ensure a balance between innovation and production stability.

• Make go/no-go decisions based on QA, V&V testing, and quality outcomes.

• Conduct blameless post-release reviews and facilitate follow-ups on root-cause analyses.

• Implement standardized change control, version management, release branching, policies, documentation, and traceability.

• Ensure configuration integrity across robot platforms and various hardware variants.

• Collaborate with Issue Management, Systems Engineering, and Test teams on release vehicles and validation strategies.

• Coordinate integration testing across hardware, software, and AI subsystems.

• Oversee field readiness assessments, deployment scenario validations, and customer acceptance criteria.

• Drive the resolution of defects, integration challenges, and regression failures.

• Establish release trains and standardized pipelines to eliminate manual steps and enhance build and release efficiency.

• Plan staged OTA rollouts through internal fleets, canary sites, rollout rings, and general availability.

• Set up rollback criteria, automated rollback hooks, and production contingency plans.

• Align customer-site schedules and acceptance criteria.

• Maintain incident playbooks and support incident responses and post-deployment issue resolutions.

• Monitor release metrics and implement CI/CD, signing, artifact, and OTA pipelines.

• Tag releases in telemetry, logging, and tracing systems, and create dashboards and alerts for stakeholders.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience in release management for complex integrated systems involving hardware, firmware, and software.

• Proven success in managing releases in robotics, autonomous systems, automotive, aerospace, or related hardware-software fields.

• Experience in coordinating cross-functional teams through intricate product development and deployment cycles.

• Capable of functioning effectively in fast-paced, high-growth settings with changing requirements.

• Hands-on expertise in developing release automation, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment orchestration using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Buildkite.

• Strong knowledge of SDLC, configuration management, and best practices in version control.

• Familiarity with Git and issue tracking tools such as Jira or GitHub, including severity-based triage and release criteria.

• Experience in instrumenting delivery and fleet health using observability tools like Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Foxglove, Datadog, or Sentry.

• Proficiency in Python and Bash/Shell for automation and data analysis purposes.

• Experience with OTA updates, versioning, canary and ring-based rollouts, rollback design, and fleet state tracking.

• Understanding of release dependencies among software, firmware, and hardware variants.

• Acquainted with release health metrics and defining SLIs/SLOs for deployed devices.

• Ownership mentality, strong technical communication skills, ability to influence without authority, data-driven decision-making, analytical and problem-solving abilities, and comfort in ambiguous situations.

• Current authorization to work in the United States.

• Bonus points for experience in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or advanced manufacturing automation; knowledge of ROS 2; release train models; automated release notes and artifact management; artifact signing and secure update chains; Docker; fleet issue triage and root-cause analysis.

🏝️ Benefits

• 401(k) Plan with a 6% company match.

• Company stock options.

• 100% company-paid medical, dental, vision, and short/long-term disability insurance for employees.

• Benefits eligibility starting from the first day of employment.

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Flexible, unlimited PTO and 12 company holidays, including a winter shutdown, for exempt employees.

• 10 vacation days, paid sick leave, and 12 company holidays, including a winter shutdown, annually for non-exempt employees.

• Catered lunches four times a week and healthy snacks and refreshments available at Salem and Pittsburgh locations.

• Generous paid parental leave programs.

• Flexible work arrangements.

• Professional development and tuition reimbursement programs.

• Relocation assistance for eligible roles.

• Annual discretionary bonus for eligible roles.