What are the responsibilities and job description for the IT Release & Quality Manager position at Sunstate?
The IT Release & Quality Manager is responsible for enabling high‑quality, predictable, and scalable software releases across Agile and DevOps delivery teams. This role provides leadership over release strategy, quality governance, and continuous improvement, ensuring that frequent deployments meet defined quality standards while supporting rapid business delivery.
Acting as a facilitator and advisor, this role balances speed and stability, drives consistency across teams, and embeds quality practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise Agile Release Leadership
- Own and evolve the enterprise release management strategy for Agile and DevOps delivery models
- Coordinate complex, multi‑team and multi‑product releases across value streams
- Align release execution with sprint and continuous delivery cadences
- Manage cross‑team dependencies, shared services impacts, and environment constraints
- Provide executive‑level visibility into release readiness, risks, and outcomes
Quality Management & Governance
- Establish and enforce release quality standards across Agile teams
- Ensure quality is embedded early in the SDLC through:
- Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD)
- Test automation standards
- Non‑functional requirements (performance, security, reliability)
- Partner with QA, SRE, and DevOps teams to ensure:
- Adequate test coverage and automated validation
- Production monitoring and alerting readiness
- Defined rollback and recovery procedures
- Lead release quality reviews and post‑release retrospectives focused on defect prevention
- Track and analyze quality metrics such as:
- Change failure rate
- Escaped defects
- Production incident trends
Continuous Delivery & DevOps Enablement
- Support adoption of:
- Feature flags and progressive delivery
- Automated testing and quality gates
- Collaborate with platform teams to improve pipeline reliability and performance
- Promote standardization while allowing team‑level autonomy
Risk‑Based Change & Compliance
- Apply pragmatic, risk‑based change enablement aligned with Agile principles
- Ensure regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements are met without excessive overhead
- Maintain traceability between features, changes, releases, and deployments
- Guide teams on appropriate controls for low, medium, and high‑risk releases
Communication & Stakeholder Management
- Serve as the senior point of contact for release and quality topics
- Communicate clearly with:
- Product and EPMO leaders
- Engineering and QA
- Operations, security, and support teams
- Provide concise reporting on release health, quality trends, and improvement opportunities
- Lead go/no‑go discussions and escalate risks when needed
Required Qualifications
Experience
- 8 years of IT delivery experience
- 4 years in Project Management or Quality Management,
- Proven experience leading releases in Agile and CI/CD environments
- Experience coordinating enterprise‑scale or mission‑critical releases
Skills & Competencies
- Deep understanding of Agile processes
- Strong leadership, facilitation, and influencing skills
- Ability to balance speed of delivery with quality and risk
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Strong analytical mindset with a focus on metrics and outcomes
Why Choose Us?
At Sunstate, every employee is valued, respected, and fairly compensated. More importantly, every employee has a voice that deserves to be heard. We are working hard to challenge the typical ways of business and develop an environment where our employees feel safe, comfortable, and look forward to coming to work. No matter which location you visit, you can’t help but feel the close-knit work-family environment.
We have strategically and organically grown our company from within, promoting from the ground up and providing employees with opportunities to explore their different passions within our own walls. This culture allows our people to develop valuable, marketable skills they can use throughout their career. Plus, with benefits like Baby Bonding, My Holiday vacation time, and discounts on everything from movie tickets to cell phone bills, we’re constantly evolving our resources to provide our people with tools to make their lives easier!
Be YOU at Sunstate
At Sunstate Equipment, we are actively fostering a workplace culture where individuals of all identities and life experiences feel genuinely valued, respected, and appreciated. As a proud equal-opportunity employer, we wholeheartedly welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds and cultures. We recognize and celebrate the unique perspectives they bring, with the understanding that they are the fuel for the innovative ideas that drive the evolution of our industry.
Sunstate Equipment Co. is an Equal Opportunity Employer
A Drug Free Workplace and Participates in E-Verify