Job Summary

Discovery along with the rest of the media industry is undergoing a transformation to build unique experiences around the world-class non-scripted video content in the form of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) products on dozens of different platforms. They key to delivering dozens of products globally is a robust platform that serves as the foundation for building the products such as Discovery Plus, Discovery GO (18 US brands such as Discovery Channel, TLC, Food Network, Animal Planet, HGTV, MotorTrend), Eurosport, GolfTV, DPlay, and many others. This DTC platform will power the digital transformation of Discovery & enable the future of interactive & personalized video experiences for global audiences spanning 220 countries.

The Director of Release Management will lead, manage, and inspire the release management teams that span multiple areas of the DTC OTT platform. They will develop the global release strategy working closely with peers on the digital platform teams in Seattle, New York & London and the product, design, and P&L leaders across the globe.  They will work closely with the Global Release Tooling team, a group dedicated to automation of the release pipeline.
 
An ideal candidate will take a hands-on approach to deliver a true multi-tenant platform that will power all the brands of Discovery. They build for scale, develop technologies with a long-term outlook, build trust with their release team and people from all areas of the business, and have a proven track record. This leader takes end-to-end ownership and consistently delivers results in a fast-paced environment. They are a leader that the team loves to work with because they inspire, develop, and care for their team members.

Responsibilities

The ideal candidate is an established leader, responsible for leading and managing a global release management team and processes. You are responsible for helping define the mission of your team, inspiring and motivating your team to pursue that mission, and setting strategic goals for them to achieve in that pursuit. You have a balanced understanding of business and technical objectives and your guidance is sought out because your decisions drive the best outcomes for both.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in building and growing a distributed team of release managers with strong skills in devOps workflows as it relates to branching strategy, semantic versioning, sprint planning, dependency management, different test activities and release tracking at global scale. 
• 5+ years experience of working with frontend (iOS, Android, Web, Roku, CTV) and backend engineering and QA teams to coordinate dependencies and release planning. 
• Operational and release management experience in an agile framework within a media or technology company preferred
• Experience in expanding release management practices across multiple products in multiple regions across the globe.
• Experience working with DevOps teams to drive improvements in Release Tools pipeline for automated tracking and reporting on release artifacts : JIRA items, sprint scope, bug report, test report, release notes. 
• Expert in driving collaboration across product, engineering, QA, and operations functional areas. 
• You define and leverage Release KPI, including the correlation with quality and performance KPI to leverage fact-based decision making.
• You understand complexity and have the ability to simplify process, tools and automation to enable feature velocity.
• You have strong skills and experience across various technologies: GitHub, Github Actions, CircleCI, Spinnaker, Jenkins, Docker/Kubernetes, gitOps flows.
• You provide guidance and expertise on system options, risk and impact management, as well as cost vs. benefit analysis
• You have the ability to work collaboratively within a team environment to meet aggressive goals and pre-defined measurement criteria
• You have excellent written communication, problem solving, process management, cross-team collaboration and high customer empathy
• Strive in a culture of innovation – always exploring ways to say yes and try out new ideas and living outside your comfort zone
• You are comfortable handling multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• You influence teams and groups outside your wider organization with your deep insight and strategic thinking.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
• Must be willing to travel
• Must have the legal right to work in the United States