Senior Release Manager - IFS Copperleaf

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Release Manager to manage, coordinate, and govern the delivery of IFS Copperleaf's product releases. The Senior Release Manager is the single point of accountability for a release, owning it from planning through general availability, and ensuring the committed scope ships on the agreed upon date at the agreed upon level of quality. Senior Release Managers operate at the intersection of Engineering and R&D, Product, Client Experience, Operations, Sales, and Marketing. They orchestrate critical release activities across the three R&D pillars: Core Engineering, AI Engineering & Transformation, and Agentic Platform, and across the operations and commercial functions, ensuring every team and every function moves on the same rhythm. They make complex, multi-pillar releases predictable for customers and the business, while progressively shortening the internal release cycle to early-adopter customers so R&D can learn and iterate faster without disrupting the external GA cadence the market depends on. This is a pivotal time to be in this role. The R&D team is implementing an Agentic Operating Model (AOM) to accelerate delivery, having humans and AI Agents working in collaboration to reshare how R&D builds software, embedding AI-augmented production capabilities into every stage of the release lifecycle. The Senior Release Manager is central to making both transitions work: building the cadence, integrating AOM into the release governance model, and ensuring we continue to deliver predictably to our customers while the way we build software fundamentally changes. Reporting to the VP of Engineering in R&D, the Senior Release Manager works in close partnership with the three Senior Directors leading the R&D pillars, with Product Management, Customer Experience (CX), Operations, Marketing and Sales teams. The Senior Release Manager also works with close relationship with Program Managers and Technical Product Owners (Champions), who report to their R&D's Senior Director on the day-to-day coordination of the release success.

Responsibilities

• Release Train Coordination
• Control and manage the release project plan across the three R&D pillars (Core Engineering, AI Engineering & Transformation, Agentic Platform) and the cells within them.
• Own and run the release battle rhythm, bringing all pillars, Product, and key cross-functional stakeholders together to agree and deliver on scope and dependencies.
• Leads cross-pillar meeting cadences and governs release activities (evolved from the current R&D Internal Progress Review), ensuring real-time visibility across pillars and cells.
• Release Planning & Scope Governance
• Maintain the release project plan, release calendar, and canonical scope baseline.
• Coordinate cross-pillar dependencies, sequencing, and shared-capacity decisions; maintain the cross-pillar dependency board.
• Establish release-level commitments, exit criteria, and definition of done at each gate.
• Contribute to release planning and senior leadership gates approval (3 gates: scope intent; execution plan; pre-launch review).
• Run change control: detect, surface, and adjudicate scope changes through formal change management; block undocumented scope from entering the release.
• Hold defined decision rights at each gate: authority to block release progression on unmet exit criteria, defer scope, and require rework; escalate to the VP of Engineering and R&D when gate decisions are contested or commercial commitments conflict with readiness.
• Maintain release governance documentation, runbooks, policies, and audit trails.
• Run release progress reports and communications through the organization, including activity progress, risk register, and release scope, schedule, and cost elements.
• Cross-Pillar Coordination
• Partner with the Program Managers and Technical Product Owners (Champions) across the three R&D pillars as the primary interface for release coordination.
• Aggregate pillar-level status, risks, and dependencies into a release-level view.
• Convene cross-pillar problem-solving sessions when dependencies, conflicts, or scope changes require negotiation between pillars.
• Work with R&D Senior Directors, supporting them in scope, capacity, and prioritisation decisions that affect release outcomes.
• Cross-Functional Alignment
• Establish and own specific gate release meetings, aligning Operations and Client Experience on support readiness, client migration, and infrastructure readiness for the upcoming release as well as enablement, positioning, and launch readiness.
• Drive active participation in release enablement: coordinate demo releases and par

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