DevOps Release Manager

Join us, be part of more. We’re so much more than an energy company. We’re a family of brands revolutionising how we power the planet. We're energisers. One team of 21,000 colleagues that's energising a greener, fairer future by creating an energy system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, whilst living our powerful commitment to igniting positive change in our communities. Here, you can find more purpose, more passion, and more potential. That’s why working here is #MoreThanACareer.

We do energy differently - we do it all. We make it, store it, move it, sell it, and mend it. Centrica, Technology is a core driver of how we deliver our strategy. You’ll join a team modernising our platforms, strengthening cyber and operational resilience, and advancing a product‑led way of working that brings engineers, data specialists and business experts together to deliver meaningful outcomes at pace. We’re scaling automation and AI from proof‑of‑concept into real, end‑to‑end change - improving customer journeys, reducing cost‑to‑serve, accelerating delivery, and building the digital foundations that underpin everything from energy trading and risk to field operations and critical infrastructure.

If you want to work on complex, high‑impact problems using modern engineering practices, and help build reusable platforms that will shape how Centrica operates over the next decade, this is the place to do it. An opportunity to play your part as a DevOps Release Manager, you will serve as the technical owner of the end‑to‑end release lifecycle including engineering, automating, and orchestrating builds and deployments across Corporate Technology platforms. This role is hands on with CI/CD pipelines, environment configurations, test automation, deployment strategies, and observability. It drives release governance and risk management through automated controls, ensuring releases are reliable, auditable, secure, and aligned to business priorities.

You will collaborate with cross‑functional teams, including Product Owners, Squad Leads, Project Managers, Development, QA/QE, Security, Architecture, Operations, and Change/ITSM teams.

Location: UK-based hybrid role, occasional travel to site.

Day to day:

• Plan and coordinate end‑to‑end release cycles - scheduling, scope, dependency mapping, code freeze and blackout windows, release notes, and cutover plans.
• Run automated pre‑deployment checks (test coverage, quality gates, security scans, approvals) and go/no go readiness via pipeline policies.
• Integrate with Change Enablement (e.g., ServiceNow): auto create/update change records, capture evidence, CAB attendance for major releases.
• Engineer, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines - design, build and operate multi‑stage pipelines (build, test, security scan, package, deploy) to ensure automated, repeatable and secure release processes that improve deployment reliability and reduce manual effort.
• Manage environment readiness and deployment execution - define environment topology, variables, secrets, and config; manage ADO Library/Key Vault integrations securely (no secrets in code); maintain configuration as code, parameterise per environment, and validate via automated smoke tests.
• Coordinate test data, service virtualisation and infra dependencies to ensure deployments execute successfully and services remain stable.
• Govern release quality, risk and compliance - apply automated quality gates, security controls, auditing and change‑management processes to all releases, ensuring compliance with organisational standards and reducing change‑related incidents.
• Troubleshoot and resolve release and deployment issues - identify, analyse and resolve pipeline failures, deployment errors, configuration drift or environment issues; work directly with multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) to minimise downtime and ensure rapid service recovery.
• Drive continuous improvement of release processes - publish release dashboards (ADO Boards/Power BI) with trend analysis, bottlenecks, and improvement backlogs.
• Drive post release reviews and automation of manual steps, reducing change approval time via evidence based risk controls.

Here’s who we’re looking for:

• Proven experience in Release Engineering, covering the automated creation, approval, sequencing and deployment of system change packages or in DevOps Engineering, with hands‑on responsibility for delivering complex, multi‑application releases into production environments.
• Experience of building, maintaining and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar), including YAML pipelines, pipeline templates, approvals, gates, and multi‑stage deployment workflows.
• Strong background in release orchestration, including release planning, dependency mapping, deployment execution, release notes, risk assessments and cutover/hyper care activities.
• Experience of integrating automated testing, security scanning, quality gates and compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., SonarQube, dependency scans, container image scanning).
• Experience of working with cross‑functional teams (Product Owners, Squad Leads, Development, QE, Security, Architecture, Operations, Change) to coordinate releases, resolve blockers and ensure platform stability.
• Practical experience leading major incident bridges or post‑release issue triage, with the ability to analyse logs, metrics, events and traces to identify root cause and drive remediation.
• Demonstrates the safe and responsible use of AI tools, with clear knowledge of when AI use is appropriate and strong awareness of accuracy, bias and compliance.
• Brings the ability to design and reuse prompt templates to support consistent, high‑quality workflow outputs, and is skilled in using AI to triage, classify and analyse information within Centrica policy guardrails.
• Strong ability to recognise higher‑risk scenarios and escalates to governance or security as needed.
• Shows proficiency in enterprise AI copilots, knowledge assistants and AI‑enhanced productivity tools.

Core Competencies & Technical Skills (AI and emerging technology):

• Ability to design, integrate and operate AI enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt driven workflows, retrieval augmented systems and AI agents.
• Apply structured evaluation, testing and monitoring practices to ensure AI outputs are reliable, secure and compliant with organisational guardrails.
• Prepares and manages data used in AI workflows and takes responsibility for the responsible lifecycle of AI features from experimentation through to deployment and continuous improvement.

Why should you apply?

We’re not a perfect place – but we’re a people place. Our priority is supporting all of the different realities our people face. Life is about so much more than work. We get it. That’s why we’ve designed our total rewards to give you the flexibility to choose what you need, when you need it, making sure that you and your family are supported not only financially, but physically and emotionally too. If you’re full of energy, fired up about sustainability, and ready to craft not only a better tomorrow, but a better you, then come and find your purpose in a team where your voice matters, your growth is non‑negotiable, and your ambitions are our priority. Help us, help you.