Head of Release - Cambridge

tsys; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

GlobalPayments is seeking an experienced Release Manager to lead a team responsible for rolling out changes to a high-volume payment gateway. You will define strategy, manage the end-to-end release lifecycle, and ensure safety, predictability and regulatory compliance across platforms.

The role requires strong ITIL, governance and cloud/DevOps knowledge, with ability to coordinate across distributed teams and stakeholders to deliver high-availability services.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading release management for large-scale payment platforms.
• Knowledge of ITIL and governance in software delivery.
• Experience with CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
• Ability to engage executive stakeholders and cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Line manager of a team of release managers responsible for the roll out of changes to a very high volume payment gateway.
• Defines and leads the release management strategy for GlobalPayments payment gateways, cloud platforms and supporting technology services.
• Manages the full release lifecycle, including release planning, readiness, approval, deployment, monitoring, post-release validation, audit evidence and continuous improvement.
• Ensures software, infrastructure, cloud and platform changes are delivered safely, predictably and without negative customer or operational impact.
• Owns release governance across business-critical, high-availability payment processing services, balancing delivery throughput, operational resilience, regulatory obligations and customer experience.
• Leads release planning, scheduling, stakeholder engagement and supplier coordination across cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Manages the work efforts of Release Managers and associated release, deployment and platform delivery resources, including leadership, coaching, performance management and resource planning.
• Identifies and allocates release, technical, engineering, DevOps, cloud and operational resources to support portfolio and programme delivery priorities.
• Forecasts release and deployment resource needs based on product demand, portfolio commitments, platform roadmap activity and operational change volumes.
• Ensures release activity adheres to agreed change, incident, audit, PCI, security, risk and operational control standards.

Skills

Release management

Project management

ITIL

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

DevOps

Stakeholder management

AWS

Kubernetes

Observability

Tools

Terraform

Jenkins

OpenShift

EKS

Helm

Job description

Job Description

Ready to take your career global?

Are you ready to unleash your full potential? We're looking for people who are passionate about payments to chart GlobalPayments' path to being the largest and most-loved payments company in the world.

What you will be doing

• Line manager of a team of release managers responsible for the roll out of changes to a very high volume payment gateway.
• Defines and leads the release management strategy for GlobalPayments payment gateways, cloud platforms and supporting technology services.
• Manages the full release lifecycle, including release planning, readiness, approval, deployment, monitoring, post-release validation, audit evidence and continuous improvement.
• Ensures software, infrastructure, cloud and platform changes are delivered safely, predictably and without negative customer or operational impact.
• Owns release governance across business-critical, high-availability payment processing services, balancing delivery throughput, operational resilience, regulatory obligations and customer experience.
• Leads release planning, scheduling, stakeholder engagement and supplier coordination across cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Manages the work efforts of Release Managers and associated release, deployment and platform delivery resources, including leadership, coaching, performance management and resource planning.
• Identifies and allocates release, technical, engineering, DevOps, cloud and operational resources to support portfolio and programme delivery priorities.
• Forecasts release and deployment resource needs based on product demand, portfolio commitments, platform roadmap activity and operational change volumes.
• Ensures release activity adheres to agreed change, incident, audit, PCI, security, risk and operational control standards.
• Provides input into product, platform and technology direction where release complexity, operational readiness or deployment risk may affect delivery outcomes.
• Coordinates with engineering, platform, product, service management, security, risk, audit and compliance teams to verify that releases meet regulatory and operational requirements.
• Ensures proper application of cloud, DevOps and platform technologies to support safe, repeatable and observable production release outcomes.
• Champions CI/CD, deployment automation, infrastructure as code, release pipeline improvement and repeatable deployment practices.
• Ensures release approaches are appropriate for cloud-hosted and hybrid platforms, including technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes, OpenShift, EKS, EC2, Helm, Jenkins and Terraform.
• Ensures effective monitoring, alerting, logging and observability are in place so deployment progress, service health and customer impact can be understood quickly.
• Oversees release communications before, during and after deployment, ensuring stakeholders receive timely, accurate and business-relevant updates.
• Resolves critical release issues, acts as an escalation point for release readiness and deployment risk, and contributes to broader technology and service improvement.
• Ensures base applications, platforms and supporting services meet appropriate quality, resilience and release-readiness standards.
• Adheres to departmental software delivery, release management, change management and client delivery process standards.
• Other related duties assigned as needed.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of GlobalPayments products, services, payment processing platforms and customer-facing technology capabilities.
• Knowledge of release management, deployment management, change management, ITIL, service management and operational governance practices.
• Knowledge of cloud, DevOps and platform engineering principles, including CI/CD, automation, infrastructure as code, container orchestration and observability.
• Knowledge of relevant cloud and deployment technologies, including AWS, Kubernetes, OpenShift, EKS, EC2, Helm, Jenkins, Terraform and equivalent tooling.
• Knowledge of regulated technology environments, including PCI, audit, security, risk and evidence requirements.
• Skill in release planning, project management, organisation, communication, analysis and people leadership.
• Skill in leading, supervising and managing effectively under pressure, particularly during complex or time-critical release activity.
• Skill in translating technical deployment risk into clear business impact and actionable decision-making.
• Ability to interact confidently with executive-level stakeholders, internal customers, suppliers and senior technology leaders.
• Ability to analyse business, product and operational needs and determine the related release, platform and technology support required.
• Ability to maintain positive working relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to manage multiple releases, projects, activities, dependencies and problem areas concurrently.
• Ability to delegate work to qualified managers, release leads, engineers or delivery resour