SQA Change & Release Manager

Role Summary: The strategic gatekeeper for all production deployments. This role bridges Quality Assurance, Change Management, and IT Operations by ensuring that no code enters the live environment without strict QA, Business and InfoSec clearance, and formal CAB authorization.

Key Responsibilities

• Release Governance & Control: Act as the final QA authority before CAB submission, ensuring all releases have mathematically sound Release Readiness Scores, zero Open Critical/High defects, and complete Requirements Traceability Matrices (RTM).
• CR Lifecycle & Dashboard Management: Maintain and monitor the QA and CR Aging Dashboards. Proactively track Change Requests across phases, identifying bottlenecks and escalating aging CRs to department heads to ensure strict SLA compliance.
• Deployment Validation: Serve as the mandatory QA Reviewer during production deployment windows. Verify post-deployment logs and cryptographic hashes to ensure the IT-Ops deployed codebase identically matches the QA-certified artifact.
• Change Freeze & Schedule Management: Coordinate with the PMO, IT Operations, and Business Sponsors to define deployment windows, manage enterprise change freezes, and authorize emergency (eCAB) bypass procedures when necessary.
• Continuous Improvement: Feed production defect leakage data and Hypercare Root Cause Analysis (RCA) metrics back into the testing lifecycle to continuously harden the release pipeline.
• Core Skill Set: ITIL Release & Deployment Management, CAB governance, Change Request (CR) lifecycle tracking, KPI dashboard administration, CI/CD pipeline principles, and enterprise risk mitigation.
• Years of Experience: 10–15 years in IT Quality Assurance, Release Management, or Change Management, preferably within a highly regulated banking or financial services environment.
• Preferred Certifications: ITIL v4 Specialist (Release, Control and Validation), PMP or Prince2, ISTQB Foundation/Advanced.