Senior Portfolio Release Manager — Flights Acquisition & Retention

PRICELINE CAREERS; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 164,000 - 192,000; Full time

Job summary

Priceline is seeking a Senior Portfolio Release Manager for the Flights Acquisition & Retention group in Toronto. You will orchestrate releases across product, engineering, commercial, and operations, ensuring quality and on-time delivery.

The role requires 7+ years in Agile delivery or release management, strong stakeholder skills, and the ability to manage cross-team dependencies in a fast-paced travel/e-commerce environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in Agile delivery, TPM, Release or Portfolio Management.
• Strong release management in Product Operating Models (POMs).
• Experience coordinating cross-functional releases across search, shopping, pricing, ML/experimentation.
• Experience growing new customers via channels (Meta).
• Coordinate dependencies across teams while balancing speed with stability.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the release calendar for the Flights Acquisition & Retention group.
• Coordinate cross-functional releases across product, engineering, commercial, and operations.
• Ensure releases align with strategic initiatives and seasonal demand.
• Establish processes and controls to enable teams and manage risk.
• Coordinate dependencies across Flights and other teams to ensure smooth rollouts.
• Define release criteria and post-release monitoring with partners.

Skills

Agile delivery

Release Management

Portfolio Management

Cross-functional leadership

Stakeholder management

Communication skills

Problem solving

Attention to detail

Job description

Senior Portfolio Release Manager — Flights Acquisition & Retention

R5846

Location

Toronto

Technology

Senior Portfolio Release Manager — Flights Acquisition & Retention

This role is eligible for our hybrid work model: 2 days in-office.

This job posting is for an existing, currently vacant position

Senior Portfolio Release Manager — Flights Acquisition & Retention

Our Technology team is the backbone of our company: constantly creating, testing, learning, and iterating to better meet the needs of our customers. If you thrive in a fast-paced, ideas-led environment, you’re in the right place.

Why this job’s a big deal:

As a Senior Portfolio Release Manager, your role centers on orchestrating the successful, predictable, and scalable delivery across the Flights Acquisition & Retention group. This group sits in our Flights organization and is responsible for growing our market footprint through owned channels, meta and agentic distribution, and deal products that convert new and returning customers. The teams in this group manage our ability to attract & retain new customers through various channels (meta, agentic distribution, etc.).

You will operate at the Flights Acquisition & Retention group level, driving alignment and release coordination across the teams responsible for flight acquisition channels, customer deals and post booking experience. You will ensure releases ship with quality, transparency, and operational readiness, while continuously evolving release processes to support agility, compliance, and scale as the Flights shopping funnel grows in complexity.

As a senior leader, you will serve as a strategic partner to Flights Engineering, Product and Commercial leaders — reducing delivery risk and giving teams the confidence to ship shopping experience improvements quickly and safely.

In this role you will get to:

Portfolio Release Planning & Coordination

• Own and maintain the release calendar for the Flights Acquisition & Retention group, coordinating across product, engineering, commercial, and operations teams


• Orchestrate complex, cross-functional releases spanning different areas within flights with dependencies on various downstream and upstream teams across Priceline.


• Ensure releases are aligned to Flights strategic initiatives, roadmap milestones, and seasonal travel demand peaks (e.g., holiday and summer travel surges).


• Drive ways of working with the team – establishing processes, systems and controls as required to enable teams and manage risk. This includes how we work together with other teams.


• Manage cross-team dependencies and sequencing across the Flights Acquisition & Retention group and other Flights teams (e.g., Supply, Shopping Experience, etc).

Risk, Governance & Quality Management

• Identify and proactively manage risks to release quality, timing, shopping funnel stability, and rollback readiness — recognizing that shopping experience issues have an immediate, visible impact on conversion and revenue.


• Partner with Engineering, Data, and InfraOps teams to establish and enforce release criteria, validation gates, governance processes, and post-release monitoring


• Maintain controls required for compliance, audit, or change management, including fare display and pricing-related regulatory considerations.

Cross-Team Communication & Stakeholder Alignment

• Serve as the central point of coordination for Flights Acquisition & Retention group; coordinating releases, connecting Product, Engineering, Commercial, Analytics, and other teams (Finance, Customer Care, Security, Legal, and Operations stakeholders)


• Communicate release scope, timelines, dependencies, risks, and critical incidents to Flights leadership and partner teams.


• Partner with Product Managers and Engineering leaders to develop release communications, change advisories, and rollout strategies for launches.


• Drive alignment across Flight teams operating within the Product Operating Model (POM), ensuring transparency and accountability.

Process Improvement & Automation

• Continuously improve release management processes, tooling, and reporting to support faster, safer, and more predictable shopping experience releases.


• Partner with DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering teams to advance CI/CD pipelines, release automation, feature flagging, and model deployment processes for search, pricing, and ranking systems.


• Support the group’s transition toward continuous delivery and modern platform engineering practices for flight shopping and AI/ML-driven personalization.


• Develop scalable release frameworks and governance models that can extend across the broader Flights portfolio.

Metrics & Post-Release Analysis

Define, track, and report on release health metrics, including:

• Deployment frequency


• Failed deployments


• Change lead time


• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)


• Funnel and conversion metrics


• New Customer Acquisition metrics


• Data quality/reliability metrics (e.g., search latency, availability accuracy)


• Facilitate release retrospectives and drive continuous improvement initiatives across Flights Shopping Experience teams.


• Assess the operational, business, and customer impact of major acquisition & retention releases, including conversion, new customer growth and booking-funnel effects

Who you are:

• 7+ years of experience in Agile delivery, Technical Program Management, Release Management, or Portfolio Management, with significant experience supporting large-scale e-commerce shopping organizations.


• Deep understanding of how release management integrates into Product Operating Models (POMs) and modern iterative delivery frameworks.


• Experience leading complex, cross-functional release planning across search, shopping, pricing, personalization/ML, or experimentation systems, ideally within travel, e-commerce, or another high-volume consumer shopping environment.


• Familiarity with growing new customers via various channels (i.e. Meta)


• Fluent in Agile methodologies and frameworks, including Scrum, Kanban, and continuous delivery practices.


• Proven ability to coordinate dependencies across multiple teams while balancing delivery speed with shopping funnel stability and operational excellence.


• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence leaders across Product, Engineering, Business, and Operations.


• A proactive problem solver who identifies risks and opportunities early and makes sound decisions with incomplete information.


• A detail-oriented operator who thrives in fast-paced environments and can manage multiple competing priorities.


• Illustrated history of living the values necessary to Priceline: Customer, Innovation, Team, Accountability, and Trust.


• The Right Results, the Right Way is not just a motto at Priceline; it’s a way of life. Unquestionable integrity and ethics are essential.

Nice to have

• Experience driving new customer growth via Agentic Commerce channels


• Proficiency leveraging AI and automation tools to improve reporting, release processes, and operational workflows.


• Familiarity with Agentic AI technologies and AI-assisted software delivery practices.

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. In addition to a competitive base salary, certain roles may be eligible for an annual bonus and/or equity grant.

The salary range for this position is $115,000-135,000