Release Manager in Cardiff

Release Manager - Cardiff/Newport/Agile - £65,000

What will you be doing?

As our Release Manager, you will bring the governance, rigour, communication, and cross team leadership needed to ensure every release is planned, tested, risk assessed, approved, and successfully deployed.

This is a newly created, high impact role with real influence — without direct line management, but with significant leadership across Change, IT, Operations, Testing, Architecture, and third party suppliers.

What will we offer you?

As one of our valued colleagues, you will have access to a range of benefits designed to support your wellbeing, development and work-life balance.

• 25 days' holiday, plus bank holidays PLUS a day off on your birthday to help you celebrate!
• Opportunity to purchase additional holidays.
• A commitment to your ongoing training and development including a rotational development programme.
• Up to 14 hours of paid Society leave to volunteer for a local community initiative.
• Various health and wellbeing benefits such as 24-hour Employee Assistance Programme, subsidised flu jabs and eye tests.
• Private healthcare (subject to selection & completion of medical disclosure form).
• Personal health cash plan and dental cover (subject to selection).
• Life Assurance – 4 times your basic salary life cover, along with critical illness cover.
• Generous Stakeholder Pension Scheme, where the Society contributes 10% on top of your 3% contribution.

Your key tasks and responsibilities will include:

• Implement and own our Release Management Framework
• Coordinate all steps of the route to live lifecycle - planning, scheduling, testing, approvals, deployment, early life support and post implementation review
• Maintain the Forward Schedule of Change, preventing collisions and giving clear visibility of upcoming releases
• Assure business readiness, technical readiness, and operational readiness for every deployment
• Lead cross team and vendor coordination to ensure smooth, predictable release cycles
• Manage risks, issues, and go/no go criteria, making well-reasoned decisions during release windowsChampion continuous improvement, automation, tooling, and data driven insights
• Provide clear communication to senior stakeholders, project teams, and impacted business areas

What type of person will you need to be?

• Able to build strong, collaborative relationships across teams
• Communicates clearly and calmly, even during incident or release pressure
• Is naturally structured, disciplined, and highly organised
• Brings curiosity and forward thinking to improve processes and tooling
• Makes sound decisions backed by evidence and risk awareness
• Always considers the customer impact of releases
• Significant experience in Release Management and Environment Management, including establishing and implementing structures
• Strong technical understanding of multi-system, multi-vendor IT landscapes
• Proven success coordinating releases across internal teams and third party suppliers
• Excellent communication, influence, and stakeholder management capability
• Strong grounding in SDLC, DevOps, testing, and change management
• Confidence under pressure, with the ability to make informed decisions quickly
• Experience in regulated or high risk environments (e.g., FS, banking, building societies)
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines or release automation tooling
• ITIL certification or CAB/governance forum experience

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