Release Lead - Enterprise AI Platform

C3 AI

Redwood City (CA)

On-site

USD 150,000 - 190,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Job summary

C3 AI in Redwood City is seeking a Technical Program Manager to own release management for the C3 Agentic AI Platform. You will run the release train end to end, defining the release, upholding quality, making go/no-go decisions, and shipping to production on committed dates.

This hands-on role sits in the branch plan, readiness evidence, defect triage, and deployment window, collaborating with platform engineering, product management, data science, QA, and cloud operations.

Qualifications

Bachelor's or graduate degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
5+ years in technical program management, release management, or engineering program ownership for a commercial software product.
Demonstrated ownership of software releases end to end: defining release scope, managing dependencies and risk, scheduling, and shipping to production on a recurring cadence.
Working fluency with source control and branching strategy, CI/CD, test automation, defect triage, and cloud deployment.
Strong understanding of AI and machine learning concepts and the technologies behind them.
Track record of creating a process and getting an organization to actually follow it.
Ability to hold a quality bar under schedule pressure, and the judgment to know when the bar should move and when it should not.
Excellent written and verbal communication with both engineering teams and senior leadership.
Proficiency with Agile, Scrum, or Kanban and the tooling around them (e.g. Jira).

Responsibilities

Define release scope, cadence, and schedule for the C3 Agentic AI Platform, including branch cuts, code freeze, release candidates, GA, and patch and hotfix lines.
Maintain complete and current state on every item in the release: committed features, open dependencies, blocking defects, and the critical path to GA.
Identify release risks early, force the trade‑off conversation between scope, schedule, and quality, and drive the decision to closure rather than escalating it upward undecided.
Own the release readiness checklist and its exit criteria across code quality, security, performance, scalability, and upgrade and migration paths.
Review the evidence submitted for each readiness task against our guidelines and reject what does not meet the bar.
Run the go/no-go with engineering and product leadership, with a documented recommendation and the data behind it.
Act as the primary point of contact through the deployment window: field deployment issues, own escalations, and execute rollback or contingency plans when needed.
Coordinate release communication to internal stakeholders, application teams, and customer‑facing organizations before, during, and after deployment.
Drive release‑related incidents to root cause with the owning teams and close the loop into the process.
Partner with release engineering and infrastructure teams to reduce manual steps in build, test, and deployment, and to shorten the path from code freeze to GA.
Onboard engineering teams onto release tooling and hold them to the process.
Instrument the release process and report on it: release predictability, cycle time from freeze to GA, escaped defect rate, hotfix volume, and readiness task turnaround.
Run release retrospectives, land the corrective actions, and cascade the resulting process changes across the engineering organization.
Maintain release documentation, release notes inputs, and the audit trail required by our quality processes.