Senior Manager, Release and Quality Lead

Merck; Hyderabad; Hybrid; INR 18,00,000 - 25,00,000; Full time

Job summary

A global healthcare biopharma company in Hyderabad is seeking a Senior Manager, Release and Quality Lead. This role involves overseeing the release cycle and ensuring quality across multiple platforms, including microservices and APIs. The ideal candidate will have over 7 years of experience in software release management, strong automation skills, and a proactive approach to quality assurance. Candidates with certifications such as ISTQB or PMP are preferred. This position offers a hybrid work arrangement.

Benefits

Flexible work arrangements

Professional development opportunities

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software release management or DevOps.
• Experience testing and releasing microservices and APIs.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure management.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the enterprise release calendar.
• Own the end-to-end release cycle for multiple platforms.
• Define and implement enterprise QA strategy.

Skills

Software release management

Quality assurance

DevOps coordination

Automation skills

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in relevant field

Tools

Selenium

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Job description

Job Description

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Secondary Language(s) Job Description:

Senior Manager, Release and Quality Lead

The Opportunity

• Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.
• Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
• Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company’s IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.

A focused group of leaders in each Tech Center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.

Role Overview

Our enterprise delivery success depends on seamless, well-coordinated, and risk-free releases across multiple technology stacks — from backend microservices to MuleSoft APIs to UI applications.

The Release Manager will be the orchestrator who ensures that every release is aligned with business priorities, meets quality gates, and follows our compliance and governance standards.

This role blends operational execution with strategic release planning to drive higher deployment velocity without sacrificing stability.

Key Responsibilities

Release Planning & Coordination

• Develop and maintain the enterprise release calendar, integrating inputs from product, development, QA, and DevOps teams.

• Own the end-to-end release cycle including planning, coordination, deployment, and post-release validation across multiple platforms (AWS-hosted microservices, MuleSoft APIs, UI applications).

• Ensure change requests are documented, approved, and communicated to all stakeholders.

• Oversee cloud infrastructure management on AWS, ensuring scalability, security, and cost efficiency.

• Manage containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes; implement scaling, monitoring, and failover strategies.

• Design, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and other automation tools.

• Champion DevOps best practices to enable faster, more reliable releases.

• Oversee multiple environments (dev, test, staging, production) with proper configuration management.

Quality Strategy & Governance

• Define and implement enterprise QA strategy for microservices, APIs, and UI applications.

• Establish quality gates within CI/CD pipelines (unit, integration, regression, security, and performance tests).

• Ensure testing aligns with SDLC phases and Agile delivery timelines.

• Maintain traceability between requirements, test cases, and defects.

• Develop and execute quality plans aligned to GxP and project requirements.

• Ensure all systems and processes meet applicable regulatory standards (FDA 21 CFR Part 11, EU Annex 11, etc.).

• Lead automation strategy using tools such as Selenium, Cypress, JUnit/TestNG, Postman/Newman, and TOSCA.

• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines to enforce “shift-left” quality.

• Collaborate with DevOps to manage test environments and data.

• Lead and coordinate test planning, execution, defect management, and reporting.

• Oversee functional, integration, regression, user acceptance testing (UAT), and validation testing aligned with Computer System Validation (CSV) principles.

Performance & Security Testing

• Oversee load, stress, and scalability testing for high-volume APIs and services.

• Ensure security testing (SAST, DAST, API security scans) is automated and monitored.

• Partner with InfoSec for vulnerability remediation tracking.

Quality & Compliance in Release

• Work with QA to verify that testing meets acceptance criteria before go-live.

• Enforce release governance policies, including security and compliance sign-offs.

• Maintain release documentation, rollback plans, and risk logs.

• Collaborate with DevOps to integrate automated build, test, and deployment processes into the release schedule.

• Ensure GitHub Actions pipelines align with release cut-off and approval processes.

Continuous Improvement & Reporting

• Identify bottlenecks in release and quality processes and drive automation, tooling, and workflow improvements.

• Provide quality and release metrics (defect density, test coverage, automation rate, on-time release rate, change failure rate) to leadership.

• Lead post-release retrospectives to identify and implement process improvements.

• Facilitate defect triage sessions and promote a zero-defect culture.

• Maintain audit-ready documentation for all validation, testing, and release activities.

• Support internal and external audits, addressing findings and corrective actions.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Provide regular status updates, release readiness reports, and post-release summaries to delivery leadership.

• Facilitate release retrospectives and defect triage sessions.

• Coordinate hotfix and emergency release processes.

• Support incident resolution by aligning Dev, QA, and Ops teams during high-priority outages.

• Mentor QA engineers and release coordinators to ensure consistent quality and release standards across teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software release management, quality assurance, or DevOps coordination roles with at least 2–3 years in a lead capacity.

• Experience testing and releasing microservices, REST APIs, and UI applications.

• Strong automation skills with tools such as Selenium, Cypress, RestAssured , Postman, JUnit/TestNG, and TOSCA.

• Familiarity with GitHub Actions CI/CD integration for automated testing and deployment.

• Understanding of AWS services, MuleSoft API testing, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure management.

• Solid grasp of SDLC, Agile, DevOps, and ITIL change/release management principles.

• Excellent stakeholder communication, leadership, and coordination skills.

• Certifications such as ISTQB, PMP, CSM, or SAFe preferred.

Soft Skills

• Strong attention to detail and quality mindset.

• Effective communication skills with cross-functional teams.

• Ability to balance compliance requirements with delivery timelines.

• Proactive problem-solver with an improvement-oriented mindset.

• Strong leadership and coordination skills to manage multiple releases and quality initiatives in parallel.

• Excellent decision-making ability under pressure.

KPIs & Success Metrics

• Defect leakage rate: Reduced defects in production.

• Automation coverage: Increased percentage of test cases automated.

• Cycle time impact: Faster release cycles without quality degradation.

• Test coverage: Maintain or improve coverage across services and UI.

• On-time release rate: Percentage of releases delivered on schedule without rollback.

• Change failure rate: Reduction in incidents caused by new releases.

• Lead time for change: Shorter cycle from code completion to production release.

• Stakeholder confidence and satisfaction: Positive feedback from product, delivery, and audit teams.

• Process improvement: Implementation of 2–3 enhancements to release and quality workflows per quarter.

Our technology teams operate as business partners, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver services and solutions that help everyone be more productive and enable innovation.

Who we are:

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.

What we look for:

Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.

#HYDIT2025

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

Shift:

Valid Driving License:

Hazardous Material(s):

Required Skills:

Data Engineering, Data Visualization, Design Applications, Software Configurations, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, System Designs, Systems Integration, Testing

Preferred Skills:

Job Posting End Date:

08/19/2025

*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFOREthe listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.