Release Train Engineer

SpaceNav; Boulder (CO); On-site; USD 115,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

SpaceNav is seeking an experienced Release Train Engineer to own how software gets planned, coordinated, and delivered across our engineering organization — the mission critical flight dynamics applications that power satellite operations for our customers.

You will be the person who makes delivery predictable: establishing the cadence and discipline that let multiple teams ship reliably, and making our path to production routine, repeatable, and safe.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/engineering.
• 7+ years in software delivery with multi-team coordination as leader or manager.
• Proven experience facilitating Agile ceremonies and driving delivery outcomes.
• Experience owning release readiness and coordinating deployments for production systems.
• Coaching engineers and driving scalable Agile practices.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery predictability across multiple teams and establish cross-team objectives.
• Manage end-to-end release readiness, criteria, and deployment execution.
• Identify and mitigate delivery and operational risks at system level.
• Maintain and evolve the organization’s development process for scale.
• Facilitate team ceremonies and stabilize backlog priorities with Product Owners.
• Align engineering work with customer objectives and leadership expectations.
• Track cross-team dependencies and impediments to prevent surprises.
• Improve workflows, ownership boundaries, and handoffs to shorten time from idea to delivered capability.
• Coach engineers on Agile fundamentals and estimation practices.
• Establish and report lightweight delivery metrics to leadership.

Skills

Agile facilitation

Release coordination

Dependency management

Delivery metrics

Scaled Agile (SAFe) knowledge

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

CI/CD

Cloud infrastructure

Containerization

Testing strategy

Job description

SpaceNav is looking for an experienced Release Train Engineer who is a self-motivated, demonstrated team-player. In this role, you'll own how software gets planned, coordinated, and delivered across our engineering organization — the mission critical flight dynamics applications that power satellite operations for our customers. You will be the person who makes delivery predictable: establishing the cadence and discipline that let multiple teams ship reliably, and making our path to production routine, repeatable, and safe.

This is a dedicated, full-time delivery leadership role, hands-on and focused on building. We have talented engineers, a documented development process, and real momentum. Your job is to turn that into consistent, predictable delivery. As Release Train Engineer, you will bring your skills in Agile facilitation, release coordination, dependency management, and delivery metrics to make that happen. You'll facilitate team ceremonies directly, partner with Product Owners on priority and backlog health, coach a young and capable engineering team into strong delivery habits, and bring your own judgment to bear on which practices we should adopt, adapt, or abandon. You will report directly to engineering leadership with genuine authority to set and enforce process.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery predictability across multiple engineering teams by establishing and running a recurring planning cadence that produces committed cross-team objectives and a visible map of the dependencies between them.
• Own release readiness end to end: define and enforce exit criteria for release candidates, ensure verification is complete and evidenced before deployment is authorized, and coordinate and be present for deployment execution and rollback readiness, serving as the single point of accountability for release execution.
• Identify and manage delivery and operational risk at the system level, maintaining a current view of what could threaten schedule, mission, or availability commitments.
• Own SpaceNav's development process end to end: keep it current as the organization grows, ensure it's applied consistently across teams, and simplify it where it's become heavier than it needs to be.
• Serve as hands‑on facilitator for team‑level ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily standups, backlog refinement, and retrospectives.
• Partner closely with Product Owners to stabilize priorities, improve backlog readiness, and establish a disciplined intake path for new work so teams stop thrashing mid‑sprint.
• Maintain alignment between engineering execution and customer objectives across all delivery teams, surfacing drift, competing priorities, and tradeoffs to leadership and Product Management early enough to act on them.
• Identify, track, and drive resolution of cross‑team dependencies and impediments before they surface as schedule surprises.
• Assess and evolve how work flows across teams — ways of working, ownership boundaries, and handoffs — to reduce cross‑team dependencies and shorten the path from idea to delivered capability.
• Coach engineers, many of them early in their careers, on Agile fundamentals, estimation, work breakdown, and the habits that make delivery repeatable.
• Establish and report lightweight delivery metrics — throughput, cycle time, predictability, and release frequency — giving leadership a clear, honest, and current picture of delivery status, risk, and forecast.
• Facilitate organization‑level retrospectives and post‑incident reviews, converting findings into tracked, closed‑out process changes.
• Collaborate with Platform Engineering to reduce release friction through improvements to CI/CD, automation, and deployment tooling.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of experience in software delivery, including 3+ years coordinating delivery across multiple teams as a Release Train Engineer, Delivery Manager, Technical Program Manager, or senior Scrum Master.
• Demonstrated experience facilitating Agile ceremonies directly — this role runs them, it does not delegate them.
• Proven track record establishing process discipline in a low‑process or fast‑moving environment, with concrete examples of delivery outcomes that improved as a result.
• Experience owning release readiness and coordinating deployments for production systems carrying uptime or availability commitments.
• Experience coaching and developing engineers earlier in their careers.
• Working fluency with scaled Agile approaches, paired with the judgment to right‑size practices to an organization's actual scale.
• Solid working knowledge of modern software delivery practices — CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, containerization, testing strategy — sufficient to engage credibly with engineers and to reason about release risk.
• Comfortable holding teams accountable to agreed commitments, with the credibility and judgment to do so without becoming an obstacle.
• SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) certification, or comparable scaled Agile certification, preferred.
• Experience delivering software in aerospace, defense, or another mission critical or regulated environment preferred.
• Must be a U.S. person, and eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

This is a full-time, onsite position based in Boulder, Colorado.

The salary range for this role is $115,000 - $140,000 per year.