Change And Release Manager- BSS Domain

Rakuten India Enterprise; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,800,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Rakuten India Enterprise is seeking an experienced Release Manager to own end-to-end software release lifecycle across multi-cloud environments (GCP, Open source) and a distributed microservices architecture. You will coordinate releases spanning billing, charging, customer management, and digital channels to production with safety and stakeholder alignment.

You\'ll lead planning, coordination with engineering, QA, DevOps, and product teams, maintain release calendars, manage branching

Job description

We are looking for an experienced Release Manager to own and orchestrate the end-to-end software release lifecycle across multi-cloud environments (GCP, Opensource) and a distributed microservices architecture. Operating at the intersection of engineering, operations, and business delivery, the role ensures that BSS platform releases — spanning billing, charging, customer management, and digital channels — are deployed to production safely, predictably, and with full stakeholder alignment.

You will coordinate releases across engineering, QA, DevOps, and product teams — ensuring quality, stability, and speed of delivery while managing a structured release calendar from scope freeze through post-deployment closure.

Key Responsibilities

1. Release Planning & Coordination

• Define and maintain release schedules, release trains, and sprint-to-production pipelines
• Coordinate with product managers, tech leads, and QA to align release scope, timelines, and dependencies
• Manage release calendars across multiple microservices with independent deployment cadences
• Run release readiness reviews, align stakeholders, and manage maintenance windows for successful production deployments
• Chair the release kick-off with the Change Management team to freeze release scope (CRs, Trouble Tickets, Problem Tickets, Technical Enhancements etc.)
• Conduct CR explanation sessions with Functional Leads.
• Own and maintain branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based development) in GitHub
• Manage GitHub Actions workflows, pull request policies, and branch protection rules
• Coordinate merges, feature flags, and hotfix processes across 100+ microservice repositories
• Enforce tagging, versioning (SemVer), and changelog standards across repos
• Collaborate with DevOps/Platform teams on Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), Helm charts, and Terraform-based infrastructure changes
• Validate branch commits for each Microservice against release scope

3. Infrastructure & Configuration Management

• Manage environment-specific config promotions and secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault)
• Ensure zero-downtime deployment strategies: blue/green, canary, and rolling updates
• Execute configuration comparison across QA, Pre-prod and Production environments
• Review PR checklists covering: EPIC completeness, flow impact analysis, NFR compliance, code coverage, and unit test coverage
• Perform replication validation of production deployment on pre prod environment.

4. Database Release Management

• Coordinate schema migrations and data migrations across polyglot database stacks (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Couchbase, Elastic)
• Partner with DBAs to review, test, and schedule backward-compatible DDL changes
• Ensure migration rollback plans exist for every release
• Oversee data remediation MOP preparation and obtain DBA/Designer/EM approvals before release

5. Runbook & MOP Ownership

• Author step-by-step runbooks covering execution sequence, expected timings, approver/reviewer names, rollback steps, and PR & Docker image details
• Prepare MOPs for all applicable release items — particularly manual activities such as DB field additions, template creation/activation, and config changes
• Conduct rollback simulation testing in the Staging environment and update runbook accordingly
• Create and maintain the Dependency Matrix mapping EPICs to Microservices for partial rollback analysis

6. Quality Gates & Risk Management

• Define and enforce release quality gates (test coverage, DAST/SAST scans, performance benchmarks)
• Identify, track, and communicate release risks and cross-service dependencies
• Lead post-release retrospectives and blameless post-mortems; maintain an incident escalation playbook
• Conduct pre-release BU (Business Unit) impact assessment and communicate risks to stakeholders

7. Monitoring & Observability

• Verify release health via monitoring dashboards (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, Dynatrace)
• Define and track release KPIs: deployment frequency, change failure rate (CFR), MTTR, and lead time for changes (DORA metrics)
• Coordinate rollback execution when SLOs are breached post-deployment

8. SVC, CR & Approval Management

• Create and drive approvals for SVC (Security Change) tickets and Release Requests (RR)
• Ensure all regulatory, security, and process compliance gates are cleared before production deployment authorization

9. Stakeholder Communication & Release Reviews

• Prepare and present release materials for L3 stakeholder review including release scope, risk summary, and deployment plan
• Facilitate L2 and L1.5 release review sessions for management sign-off
• Communicate release status, delays, and re-scheduling internal and external stakeholders with appropriate approval materials

10. Security, Compliance & Post-Release

• Manage Security Vulnerability (SecEx) ticket status and obtain extension approvals for vulnerabilities deferred to future minor releases
• Lead post-release RCA processes; track and close all open action items before the next release kick-off
• Drive process improvement initiatives in SCM, config validation, automated quality gates, and pre-production environment parity