Release Manager

6 month contract + extension

Hybrid 2x per week in Toronto

Pay: $70-84/hr incorp +HST

Must haves:

• 5+ years of experience in Release Management, Change Management, Project Delivery, DevOps, or IT Operations.
• Experience coordinating complex releases across applications, platforms, teams, and vendors within regulated enterprise production environments.
• Working knowledge of Jira, Agile, SDLC, DevOps, CI/CD, ITIL Change and Release Management, incident management, and production support.
• Experience working within a regulated financial services environment.
• Strong stakeholder management, facilitation, risk assessment, decision-making, planning, and written communication skills.

Nice to have:

• ITIL, PMP, Agile, Scrum, SAFe, or a related delivery certification.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) experience with technologies such as SailPoint IdentityIQ, Microsoft Entra ID, Privileged Access Management, or authentication platforms.

Job description:

Insight Global is seeking a Release Manager to oversee and coordinate integrated release activities across enterprise platforms and services. This individual will manage production, maintenance, hotfix, emergency, and software currency releases while ensuring alignment with Change Management standards and production governance requirements.

The Release Manager will partner across technology, project, service-owner, QA, security, engineering, and vendor teams to manage dependencies, assess readiness and risk, coordinate deployment activities, and maintain accurate release visibility in Jira. This role will also drive continuous improvement in release processes, automation, CI/CD controls, reporting, and operational readiness to improve release predictability, quality, traceability, and schedule adherence.

Responsibilities:

• Own and maintain the integrated release calendar across platforms and services.
• Plan and coordinate production, maintenance, hotfix, emergency, and software currency releases.
• Facilitate release readiness reviews and Go/No-Go decisions.
• Manage cross-team dependencies, scheduling conflicts, and implementation sequencing.
• Coordinate deployments across technology, project, service-owner, and vendor teams.
• Ensure releases meet enterprise Change Management standards and required approvals.
• Validate change records, implementation and rollback plans, testing evidence, risk mitigations, and release schedules.
• Coordinate Change Advisory Board (CAB) and other release governance activities as required.
• Monitor production changes for process, control, and documentation compliance.
• Drive timely closure of release-related audit, risk, and compliance findings.
• Govern consistent Jira usage for releases, epics, stories, and work tracking.
• Maintain accurate and traceable release scope, ownership, dependencies, status, and outcomes.
• Provide transparent reporting on planned, in-flight, completed, delayed, and failed releases.
• Partner with delivery leads to improve backlog readiness and release forecasting.
• Coordinate testing activities across QA, engineering, security, and application teams.
• Verify that readiness criteria and Definition of Done requirements are met, including regression, integration, security, performance, and operational validation.
• Ensure rollback, recovery, contingency, monitoring, support, and communication plans are documented and executable.
• Identify release and service-impact risks, assign mitigations, and escalate material issues.
• Lead post-implementation reviews for failed, unauthorized, or high-risk changes and track corrective actions.
• Define and continuously improve release management processes, standards, templates, and procedures.
• Promote deployment automation, CI/CD controls, and repeatable release practices.
• Use release KPIs, dashboards, and trend reporting to improve predictability, schedule adherence, deployment quality, traceability, and cycle time.
• Track release and change success rates with a focus on reducing release-related production incidents and improving stakeholder satisfaction.

Artificial intelligence tools are used to assist in screening and assessing applicants for this position.

Vacancy: This posting is for a currently vacant role, and the successful candidate will be hired into an existing open position.