Release Manager

About the Role

The Release Manager is accountable for planning, coordinating, governing, and executing all release activities across the sustainment program. This includes maintaining the end-to-end release schedule, ensuring all technical teams' work (standard activities, backlog, help desk driven, and strategic) is appropriately sequenced, assessed, and authorised prior to deployment.

The role is a key participant of the Change Advisory Board (CAB), including process definition, governance, stakeholder engagement, decision tracking, and alignment to ASDEFCON mandated governance structures.

Supporting a shared services model across a multi system sustainment environment, release coordination is critical to operational stability and mission outcomes. This role ensures that all release activities are visible, controlled, and approved, governance bodies receive accurate technical insight for decision making, risk is minimised through rigorous planning and stakeholder alignment, and the customer receives predictable, transparent, and auditable release performance.

Responsibilities

• Own end to end release planning and delivery across multiple mission systems and environments, including schedules, release windows, freeze periods, testing cycles, deployments, validation, and reporting.
• Lead Change and Release governance, including Chairing the CAB when required, defining and maturing CAB processes, managing emergency changes, and ensuring ASDEFCON aligned compliance, auditability, and traceability.
• Coordinate cross system dependencies and constraints, ensuring impacts, risks, resources, environmental limitations, and operational events are fully understood and reflected in release decisions.
• Act as the central liaison for release activities, connecting Engineering, Maintenance, Security, Help Desk, PMO, Operating Support, and external stakeholders, and providing clear communication on risks, decisions, and outcomes.
• Drive release readiness and quality, confirming testing evidence, documentation, deployment and rollback plans, operational acceptance, and linkage to approved change tickets.
• Continuously improve release performance and maturity, producing release metrics and reports, facilitating lessons learned, supporting long term roadmaps, and identifying opportunities for automation and efficiency uplift.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing releases in complex ICT environments, coordinating multiple technical teams, dependencies, and competing priorities across large backlogs and operational demands.
• Strong stakeholder engagement and communication skills, with the ability to influence at all levels and confidently chair cross functional technical and governance forums, including CABs.
• Solid grounding in ITIL change and release management, with hands on experience governing structured CAB processes and high risk changes.
• Highly structured and detail oriented, with strong analytical and scheduling capability and a focus on compliance, auditability, and traceability.
• Experience in secure or regulated environments (Defence, Intelligence, or similar), including familiarity with ASDEFCON governance, reporting, and audit requirements (highly desirable).
• Technically fluent and collaborative, with an engineering background or exposure to complex system dependencies and ITSM tools such as Jira, ServiceNow, or equivalent.
• Australian Citizen with an active TSPV Clearance, and ability to be successful for a DISA/OSA.

Equal Opportunity Statement

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, citizenship, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, family structure, marital status, ancestry, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Leidos will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with relevant laws.