Release Manager (Salesforce CoE / Federal Program)

Release Manager (Salesforce CoE / Federal Program)

Ashburn, VA 20147 or Springfield, VA 22153 or Lorton, VA 22079

36 Months Contract with possible extension

2 Days ONSITE/Week

US Citizens eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret Clearance

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Release Manager to support a large-scale Salesforce Center of Innovation (CoI) initiative for a Federal Government customer. This role will be responsible for planning, coordinating, governing, and executing Salesforce releases across multiple environments while ensuring stability, compliance, quality, and minimal disruption to business operations.

The ideal candidate will have deep experience managing Salesforce release cycles, DevOps processes, CI/CD pipelines, environment management, and deployment governance. This individual will work closely with Product Owners, Architects, Developers, QA teams, Security stakeholders, and Program Leadership to ensure seamless delivery of Salesforce enhancements, integrations, and platform modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Release Planning & Coordination

• Develop and maintain enterprise release calendars, deployment schedules, and release roadmaps.
• Coordinate multiple concurrent Salesforce releases across development, testing, staging, and production environments.
• Manage release scope, dependencies, timelines, and deployment readiness activities.
• Facilitate release planning meetings and go/no-go decision processes.
• Ensure alignment between business priorities, technical delivery teams, and program objectives.

Salesforce Release Management

• Oversee deployment of Salesforce platform enhancements, customizations, integrations, and configurations.
• Coordinate releases across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, OmniStudio, Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and custom Salesforce applications.
• Manage environment strategy, refresh schedules, configuration migrations, and deployment processes.
• Ensure adherence to Salesforce deployment best practices and platform governance standards.
• Support seasonal Salesforce release readiness, impact assessments, and feature adoption planning.

DevOps & CI/CD Governance

• Partner with DevOps engineers and development teams to automate and streamline deployment processes.
• Manage and improve CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Copado, Gearset, AutoRABIT, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar platforms.
• Monitor deployment performance, release quality metrics, and process effectiveness.
• Establish and maintain release controls, approval workflows, and audit trails.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce deployment risk and increase release velocity.

Quality & Risk Management

• Ensure all release artifacts meet quality, security, compliance, and testing requirements prior to deployment.
• Coordinate integration, regression, user acceptance, and production validation testing activities.
• Identify release risks, dependencies, and potential impacts and develop mitigation strategies.
• Manage rollback and contingency planning for production deployments.
• Track and resolve release-related incidents and post-deployment issues.

Stakeholder Communication & Reporting

• Serve as the primary point of contact for release planning, deployment activities, and production readiness.
• Communicate release schedules, deployment status, risks, and impacts to stakeholders and leadership.
• Prepare release documentation, deployment reports, and executive-level status updates.
• Facilitate post-release reviews and lessons-learned sessions.

Compliance & Governance

• Ensure releases comply with organizational policies, security requirements, change management procedures, and federal governance standards.
• Support audit readiness activities and maintain release documentation for compliance purposes.
• Participate in Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings and change approval processes.
• Establish release management standards and operational procedures for the Salesforce Center of Innovation.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related field.
• 5 years of Release Management experience supporting enterprise software platforms.
• 3 years of Salesforce release management experience within complex multi-org environments.
• Strong understanding of Salesforce metadata, deployment methodologies, and environment management.
• Experience managing CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• Hands-on experience with Git-based source control and branching strategies.
• Experience with release automation tools such as Copado, Gearset, AutoRABIT, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions.
• Strong knowledge of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Agile, and DevOps methodologies.
• Excellent organizational, communication, and stakeholder management skills.