Senior Release & QA Delivery Lead

Apex Group Ltd; Sydney; On-site; AUD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Apex Group Ltd is seeking a Release Manager for PAXUS Group in Sydney. You will own end-to-end release governance across core SDLC and customer-specific delivery streams, ensuring high-quality, predictable delivery of major releases and BAU fixes.

The role requires 5+ years in software delivery, strong GitHub Enterprise and Azure DevOps experience, and excellent stakeholder management across regional teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years’ experience in software delivery, release management, DevOps, or a related IT discipline.
• 2+ years’ hands‑on experience managing multi‑branch release models in an enterprise software environment.
• Demonstrated experience owning end‑to‑end release governance across major releases, minor releases, patches, and hotfixes.
• Strong practical expertise with Git branching strategies, merge/cherry‑pick workflows, conflict resolution, and change traceability.
• Intermediate‑to‑advanced experience with GitHub Enterprise and Azure DevOps, including pipelines, approvals, and release controls.
• Proven capability to run a “sprint‑style release cadence” for priority customer delivery within a non‑Scrum SDLC framework.
• Strong understanding of QA collaboration, including risk‑based testing, regression planning, defect triage, and release sign‑off gates.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, including ability to influence senior leaders, technical teams, and client representatives.
• Strong planning, analytical, and problem‑solving skills, with high attention to detail and governance discipline.

Responsibilities

• Act as the single point of accountability for release and branch governance across the core SDLC and customer-specific delivery streams.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Business analysis, Development, QA, and executive stakeholders to align release outcomes with business priorities and client commitments.
• Provide regular, clear updates to senior management on release scope, risks, timelines, quality status, and dependencies.
• Promote and embed best practices in release discipline, quality assurance, traceability, and continuous improvement.
• Define, maintain, and enforce branching and release standards across major, minor, patch, and hotfix delivery paths.
• Establish customer-specific branches at each major release baseline and manage their lifecycle, including scope control, tagging, versioning, and retirement.
• Govern merge/cherry-pick strategy between customer branches and the core SDLC branch to minimise branch drift, rework, and regression risk.
• Ensure complete change traceability across all branches, including approval records, test outcomes, release notes, and deployment history.
• Design and run a sprint-style customer release cadence for high-priority client features requiring accelerated delivery.
• Facilitate time-boxed planning and release checkpoints with customer stakeholders and internal teams to agree scope, acceptance criteria, and target production dates.
• Ensure customer‑specific releases include only approved and prioritised changes, with no uncontrolled feature inclusion.
• Coordinate structured merge-back of customer‑delivered features into the core SDLC branch following successful production release and validation.
• Own integrated release planning across annual major releases, interim minor releases, BAU fixes, and customer‑priority feature drops.
• Partner with QA to define fit‑for‑purpose test strategy and regression scope for each release type and branch path.
• Enforce release readiness gates, including scope freeze, defect triage thresholds, test sign‑off, deployment runbook completion, and rollback preparedness.
• Lead go/no‑go forums and release decision‑making with relevant business and technical stakeholders.
• Ensure post‑release validation, issue triage, and lessons‑learned activities are completed and fed back into process improvements.

Skills

Release governance

Stakeholder management

Git branching strategies

GitHub Enterprise

Azure DevOps

Release planning

Quality assurance collaboration

Communication with senior leaders

Problem solving

Education

Tertiary qualification in IT/CS/Engineering

Tools

GitHub Enterprise

Azure DevOps

Job description

Apex Group Ltd is seeking a Release Manager for PAXUS Group in Sydney. You will own end-to-end release governance across core SDLC and customer-specific delivery streams, ensuring high-quality, predictable delivery of major releases and BAU fixes.

The role requires 5+ years in software delivery, strong GitHub Enterprise and Azure DevOps experience, and excellent stakeholder management across regional teams.