Lead Release Manager

At Disney Experiences Technology, we design and deliver more than 400 digital and physical products that bring Disney stories to life in unexpected ways. From theme parks and resorts to cruise ships and beyond, our global team of technologists, designers, and innovators creates seamless, immersive experiences that delight millions of Guests and Cast Members around the world.

The Disney Signature Experiences and Data team delivers innovative technology solutions across Disney Cruise Line, Disney Vacation Club, and our global tour businesses. We support Guest and Crew experiences at sea, enable commercial growth through digital platforms, and lead the segment’s data strategy. With a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and strategic expansion, we build the systems that support immersive experiences and unlock new opportunities for growth.

Disney Cruise Line – This role is on the Disney Cruise Line team, which delivers shipboard Guest and Crew systems, commercial platforms, web and app experiences, and infrastructure operations that support seamless journeys at sea.

Responsibilities:

The Lead Release Manager owns the end‑to‑end release lifecycle for a multi‑service, multi-experience operating platform. The role establishes and enforces release governance (calendar, gates, approvals, evidence), coordinates change enablement, manages risk and rollback readiness, and harmonizes fast flow with safe operations. Operating practices are anchored in ITIL v4 Change Enablement, DevOps/DORA metrics, SRE guardrails (SLOs/error budgets), Scaled Agile‑compatible release rhythms, and feature‑management standards (e.g. LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Split) that decouple deployment from release.

Governance & Calendar

• Publish and run the platform release calendar (sprint alignment, scope‑lock, certification checkpoints, freeze/blackout windows).

• Define and administer Release Independence Tiers (Cadenced / Independent Deployment / Fully Independent) with objective criteria and onboarding/audit routines.

• Change Enablement (ITIL v4) & Compliance

• Chair/co‑chair CAB/CCB; ensure risk‑based approvals and complete, auditable change records (plan, tests, evidence, rollback).

• Uphold SOX/PCI evidence and production certification standards (security, performance, accessibility).

Quality Gates & Readiness

• Enforce non‑functional gates: performance budgets, vulnerability thresholds, error budgets/SLOs, accessibility checks.

• Require runbooks, rollback plans, on‑call escalation paths, and environment choreography (data/config/flags) before go‑live

Progressive Exposure & Feature Management

• Codify standards for flag governance (naming, environments, permissions, audit) to decouple deployment from release.

• Operate dark launches (backend toggles without UI exposure), progressive percentage rollouts with automated halt/rollback rules, and guarded/kill‑switch policies tied to health/business KPIs (e.g: LaunchDarkly).

• Coordinate targeted/cohort rollouts (e.g.: Statsig) and A/B / multivariate tests (e.g.:Split/Statsig) with product/analytics; you own guardrails and decision checkpoints.

Deployment Path & Environment Strategy

• Standardize artifact promotion paths (dev → test → stage → prod), canary/soak durations, and go/no‑go criteria. Determine timely needs of ephemeral environments to enable fast flow delivery.

• Keep authoritative release notes and ensure observability is wired to release decisioning dashboards and incident workflows.

Incident Integration & Learning Loops (SRE)

• Treat feature toggles and rollbacks as first‑line mitigations; run command‑center operations for major events and execute rehearsed procedures.

• Lead blameless post‑mortems; fold findings into standards, automation, and checklists.

• Metrics, Reporting & Continuous Improvement (DORA)

• Track and publish DORA metrics (e.g.: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and policy compliance (% gates passed, audit completeness).

• Use data to optimize cadence, tiering, gate thresholds, and calendar patterns; drive platform‑wide improvement backlogs.

Stakeholder Communication

• Provide transparent comms to engineering, ops/SRE, product, security/compliance, and executives; manage escalations on schedule/quality trade‑offs and coordinate around high‑traffic windows.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• 7+ years in Release/Change Management for large, distributed systems; 3+ years leading multi‑team/platform releases.

• Demonstrated implementation of ITIL v4 Change Enablement processes and audit‑ready evidence (e.g.: SOX/PCI).

• Proven application of DORA‑driven continuous improvement and SRE practices (SLOs/error budgets, canary/soak, blameless post‑mortems).

Technical Skill Set

• Hands‑on with CI/CD (e.g.: GitHub Actions, Harness, Azure DevOps, Jenkins), artifact repositories, automated testing, and security scanning.

• Practical expertise with feature flags & experimentation: e.g.: LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Split (progressive/targeted rollouts, kill‑switches, KPI gating).

• Cloud & containers (e.g.: AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes), GitOps deployment (e.g.: ArgoCD/Spinnaker).

• Observability and APM stacks (e.g.: Splunk Observability, AppDynanmics, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana) integrated with release health and decisioning.

Ways of Working

• Excellence in facilitation, executive communication, risk‑based decision‑making, and cross‑portfolio coordination.

• Strong documentation discipline (release notes, CAB/CCB artifacts, runbooks, rollback evidence)

Preferred Qualifications

• Led CAB/CCB programs with published calendars and portfolio visibility (e.g.: Smartsheet/Jira/Teams/SharePoint).

• Certifications: ITIL v4, SAFe (RTE exposure), PSM II/A‑CSM, AWS/Azure/GCP, PCI ISA.

• Background in SRE and inclusive/performance‑focused engineering (accessibility and performance budgets embedded in gates).

• Master’s degree preferred (e.g., MS in CS/IS/Software Engineering) or relevant advanced coursework in DevOps/SRE/ITIL.