Release Train Engineer

Leidos; Farnborough; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Leidos in Farnborough is seeking an experienced Release Train Engineer (RTE) to lead PI planning, execution and governance across complex projects. You will coordinate across Product Management, Engineering, Operations and Customer stakeholders to ensure value delivery, maintain release scope and enable fast, safe production releases.

The role combines PI Master of Ceremonies duties, release management, environment governance and build/branch governance, including Jira and Bitbucket workflows,

Job description

Description

Release Train Engineer

Location: Farnborough, with flexibility to work from home dependent on business demands

The Role:

We are seeking an experienced Release Train Engineer (RTE) to lead and orchestrate the execution of Programme Increments (PIs), releases, and environment governance across a complex projects.

The RTE is a servant leader and delivery enabler, responsible for ensuring that planning, execution, and release activities flow smoothly from concept through to production. This role blends PI facilitation, release management, configuration control, and delivery governance, with a strong emphasis on quality, transparency, and getting value delivered quickly.

This role requires strong technical awareness, excellent organisational capability, and the confidence to coordinate across Project Management, Engineering, Operations, and Customer stakeholders in a controlled delivery environment.

What will I be doing?

Release Train Engineer / PI Leadership

• Act as the Release Train Engineer (RTE) for the Agile Release Train, facilitating execution and continuous improvement.
• Serve as PI Master of Ceremonies, owning the preparation, facilitation, and follow up of PI Planning events.
• Work closely with Product Managers to ensure Features, Enablers, and supporting scope are correctly captured and maintained in Jira.
• Coordinate with PMs to align priorities and respond to customer needs and dependencies.
• Engage with customer stakeholders on PI priorities, scope, and sequencing.
• Own and maintain the PI agenda, authoring and coordinating slide content to guide PI sessions.
• Schedule and facilitate PI events (primarily virtual), ensuring effective participation and outcomes.
• Produce PI level reports, including outcomes from Multi RFC PI Planning, ensuring visibility of commitments and risks.
• Analyse PI trends such as scope creep and velocity, working with PMs and teams to understand causes and drive corrective actions.

Inspect & Adapt / Continuous Improvement

• Lead Inspect & Adapt, postmortems, and retrospectives.
• Author and coordinate retrospective slide packs, working with teams to capture learning.
• Schedule, record, and track Lessons Learned and improvement actions across PIs.

Release Management

• Own and manage release scope.
• Define and enforce how scope is added to, removed from, or adjusted within a release.
• Verify all stakeholders are aligned before scope is committed to a release.
• Proactively work with Engineering to clarify which release branch is the origin for each change.
• Reconcile PI commitments against release plans, ensuring alignment between planning and execution.
• Communicate and manage scope changes transparently across the ART.
• Maintain a strong delivery mindset with a clear objective to push work into production as quickly and safely as possible.
• Author customer facing scope and release documentation as required.

Environment Management

• Own the Release & Activities Environment Schedule across all environments.
• Coordinate sequencing of releases and activities to minimise contention and delivery risk.
• Ensure environment usage supports PI and release commitments.
• Work with PMs to secure time on the environments in support of newly contracted work in far future dates

Configuration & Change Governance

• Act as Configuration Manager, maintaining strict control over what is deployed into each environment.
• Ensure environments are protected from uncontrolled or unauthorised change.
• Bring changes through appropriate governance forums (e.g. TAB).
• Work closely with Engineering teams and the TIP Manager to coordinate deployments and cutovers.

Build & Branch Governance (ART Gatekeeper)

• Own and manage internal build numbering and versioning standards.
• Assign internal build numbers in line with agreed conventions.
• Act as gatekeeper for all pull requests (BitBucket) into release branches, ensuring:
  • Peer reviews are complete
  • Static code analysis has been completed
  • Items are in approved scope
  • Commit messages meet standards
  • Merge conflicts are resolved by Engineering
• Verify Jira items are in the correct workflow states prior to merge