Technical Program Manager, Release Management - C3 Agentic AI Platform

Responsibilities:

• Define release scope, cadence, and schedule for the C3 Agentic AI Platform, including branch cuts, code freeze, release candidates, GA, and patch and hotfix lines.
• Maintain complete and current state on every item in the release: committed features, open dependencies, blocking defects, and the critical path to GA.
• Identify release risks early, force the trade-off conversation between scope, schedule, and quality, and drive the decision to closure rather than escalating it upward undecided.
• Own the release readiness checklist and its exit criteria across code quality, security, performance, scalability, and upgrade and migration paths.
• Review the evidence submitted for each readiness task against our guidelines and reject what does not meet the bar.
• Run the go/no-go with engineering and product leadership, with a documented recommendation and the data behind it.
• Act as the primary point of contact through the deployment window: field deployment issues, own escalations, and execute rollback or contingency plans when needed.
• Coordinate release communication to internal stakeholders, application teams, and customer-facing organizations before, during, and after deployment.
• Drive release-related incidents to root cause with the owning teams and close the loop into the process.
• Partner with release engineering and infrastructure teams to reduce manual steps in build, test, and deployment, and to shorten the path from code freeze to GA.
• Onboard engineering teams onto release tooling and hold them to the process.
• Instrument the release process and report on it: release predictability, cycle time from freeze to GA, escaped defect rate, hotfix volume, and readiness task turnaround.
• Run release retrospectives, land the corrective actions, and cascade the resulting process changes across the engineering organization.
• Maintain release documentation, release notes inputs, and the audit trail required by our quality processes.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or graduate degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years in technical program management, release management, or engineering program ownership for a commercial software product.
• Demonstrated ownership of software releases end to end: defining release scope, managing dependencies and risk, scheduling, and shipping to production on a recurring cadence.
• Working fluency with modern software delivery mechanics: source control and branching strategy, CI/CD, test automation, defect triage, and cloud deployment.
• Strong understanding of AI and machine learning concepts and the technologies behind them.
• Track record of creating a process and getting an organization to actually follow it.
• Ability to hold a quality bar under schedule pressure, and the judgment to know when the bar should move and when it should not.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with both engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Proficiency with Agile, Scrum, or Kanban and the tooling around them (e.g. Jira).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on background in software engineering, quality engineering, or data science.
• Experience releasing an enterprise platform or PaaS consumed by internal application teams as well as external customers.
• Experience with multi-cloud or air-gapped deployment environments, and with compliance-constrained release processes (e.g. FedRAMP, SOC 2).
• PMP, Agile, or Scrum certification.