Change Release Manager
Posted Today by Us3 Consulting
Negotiable
Outside
Hybrid
Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Summary: The Change & Release Manager role involves leading the end-to-end release management process within a complex enterprise technology environment, focusing on governance, stakeholder management, and operational excellence. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in release management, particularly with Salesforce, and will be responsible for ensuring that software and platform changes are efficiently planned and deployed. This position requires strong leadership skills and the ability to manage multiple teams and stakeholders effectively. The role is hybrid, based in Greater London, and classified as outside IR35.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own and continuously improve the enterprise release management framework, standards, controls, and governance processes.
- Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of releases across multiple applications, platforms, and business units.
- Build and maintain release calendars, deployment schedules, and integrated change plans.
- Chair release readiness meetings, CAB inputs, go/no-go decisions, and post-release reviews.
- Ensure releases meet agreed quality gates, documentation standards, approvals, and compliance requirements.
- Coordinate dependencies across technology teams, third parties, infrastructure, security, testing, and business stakeholders.
- Drive consistency, repeatability, and continuous improvement in release execution.
- Minimise release risk, service disruption, and business impact through strong planning and controls.
- Oversee environment readiness, deployment sequencing, rollback planning, and contingency management.
- Track release KPIs such as success rates, incidents, lead times, failed changes, and deployment performance.
- Support transition from project delivery into BAU operations.
- Manage major / high-profile releases involving multiple concurrent workstreams.
- Engage senior business and technology stakeholders across programmes and operational teams.
- Communicate release scope, risks, milestones, decisions, and readiness status clearly.
- Build effective working relationships across internal teams, vendors, and system integrators.
- Support releases involving Salesforce platforms (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud or related ecosystem).
- Understand platform-specific release considerations such as metadata deployments, sandboxes, regression testing, integration dependencies, and governance.
- Ideally bring exposure to Microsoft Dynamics 365 release processes and environments.
- Coordinate enterprise releases where CRM platforms interact with broader architecture and business systems.
Key Skills:
- Proven experience as a Release Manager within a large, complex enterprise environment, particularly with Salesforce.
- Strong knowledge of release management best practice, governance, controls, and operating models.
- Experience managing releases across multiple teams, applications, suppliers, and business stakeholders.
- Demonstrable success delivering structured release processes in regulated or highly governed environments.
- Strong understanding of change management and IT service management principles.
- Hands-on experience supporting Salesforce releases in enterprise settings.
- Excellent planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication skills.
- Comfortable operating at both strategic governance level and practical delivery level.
- Experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 (desirable).
- ITIL certification or equivalent service management background (desirable).
- Experience with DevOps / CI-CD tooling and modern deployment practices (desirable).
- Knowledge of Agile, Scrum, and hybrid delivery methodologies (desirable).
- Experience with enterprise tooling such as Jira, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, Copado, Gearset, or similar (desirable).
- Experience in transformation programmes, M&A integration, or multi-vendor landscapes (desirable).
- Process-driven with strong attention to control and detail.
- Calm and decisive under pressure.
- Strong leadership and facilitation skills.
- Excellent communicator with executive presence.
- Highly organised with the ability to manage competing priorities.
- Pragmatic, collaborative, and delivery-focused.
- Continuous improvement mindset.
Salary (Rate): undetermined
City: Greater London
Country: United Kingdom
Working Arrangements: hybrid
IR35 Status: outside IR35
Seniority Level: undetermined
Industry: IT
Change & Release Manager (Outside IR35) UK (Hybrid Working) With some travel
Role Overview
We are seeking an experienced Release Manager to lead and govern the end-to-end release management process across a complex enterprise technology landscape. This role is critical in ensuring that software, configuration, and platform changes are planned, coordinated, tested, approved, and deployed in a controlled and efficient manner. The successful candidate will bring strong release governance, process discipline, and stakeholder management experience within large enterprise organisations, alongside practical domain knowledge of Salesforce and ideally Microsoft Dynamics environments. While platform experience is valuable, the key priority is someone who understands how to run robust, scalable release processes across multiple teams, suppliers, and business functions.
Key Responsibilities
- Release Management & Governance
- Own and continuously improve the enterprise release management framework, standards, controls, and governance processes.
- Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of releases across multiple applications, platforms, and business units.
- Build and maintain release calendars, deployment schedules, and integrated change plans.
- Chair release readiness meetings, CAB inputs, go/no-go decisions, and post-release reviews.
- Ensure releases meet agreed quality gates, documentation standards, approvals, and compliance requirements.
- Coordinate dependencies across technology teams, third parties, infrastructure, security, testing, and business stakeholders.
- Drive consistency, repeatability, and continuous improvement in release execution.
- Delivery & Operational Excellence
- Minimise release risk, service disruption, and business impact through strong planning and controls.
- Oversee environment readiness, deployment sequencing, rollback planning, and contingency management.
- Track release KPIs such as success rates, incidents, lead times, failed changes, and deployment performance.
- Support transition from project delivery into BAU operations.
- Manage major / high-profile releases involving multiple concurrent workstreams.
- Stakeholder Management
- Engage senior business and technology stakeholders across programmes and operational teams.
- Communicate release scope, risks, milestones, decisions, and readiness status clearly.
- Build effective working relationships across internal teams, vendors, and system integrators.
- Platform / Domain Focus
- Support releases involving Salesforce platforms (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud or related ecosystem).
- Understand platform-specific release considerations such as metadata deployments, sandboxes, regression testing, integration dependencies, and governance.
- Ideally bring exposure to Microsoft Dynamics 365 release processes and environments.
- Coordinate enterprise releases where CRM platforms interact with broader architecture and business systems.
Required Experience
- Proven experience as a Release Manager within a large, complex enterprise environment, particularly with Salesforce
- Strong knowledge of release management best practice, governance, controls, and operating models.
- Experience managing releases across multiple teams, applications, suppliers, and business stakeholders.
- Demonstrable success delivering structured release processes in regulated or highly governed environments.
- Strong understanding of change management and IT service management principles.
- Hands-on experience supporting Salesforce releases in enterprise settings.
- Excellent planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication skills.
- Comfortable operating at both strategic governance level and practical delivery level.
Desirable Experience
- Experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
- ITIL certification or equivalent service management background.
- Experience with DevOps / CI-CD tooling and modern deployment practices.
- Knowledge of Agile, Scrum, and hybrid delivery methodologies.
- Experience with enterprise tooling such as Jira, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, Copado, Gearset, or similar.
- Experience in transformation programmes, M&A integration, or multi-vendor landscapes.
Key Competencies
- Process-driven with strong attention to control and detail.
- Calm and decisive under pressure.
- Strong leadership and facilitation skills.
- Excellent communicator with executive presence.
- Highly organised with the ability to manage competing priorities.
- Pragmatic, collaborative, and delivery-focused.
- Continuous improvement mindset.