Data increasingly powers transformative experiences across society. Building a planetary scale Data Cloud is central to Microsoft’s mission to empower all our customers to participate in and benefit from this digital transformation. Azure Synapse Analytics is a technical centerpiece and major revenue driver for Microsoft in scale-out big data analytics. This service provides a massively parallel processing architecture to query petabytes of data at lightning-fast speed and is one of the fastest growing services within Azure.

The Synapse DW team is both running and improving this large and fast-growing service, while simultaneously reimagining the engineering processes to build more capabilities into the service in future. We are looking for a Release Manager that is detail-oriented, excels in execution, while simultaneously is excited to provide thought leadership to continually improve our processes and systems.

As a Release Manager, you will have the opportunity to lead and coordinate activities that define a successful release and deployment, through the entire lifecycle. You will work closely with our feature teams, support engineers, compliance experts to create and execute release plans, drive deployments, and ensure engineering lifecycle milestones are completed on time, with quality. You will generate innovative insights to help drive significant improvement, so each cycle is better than the last. And above all, each release has direct customer impact on thousands of customers, and you will be committed to ensuring customer success and satisfaction with each advancing release.

We are a diverse team that celebrate our different identities, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and workstyles. We have team members working from different offices or from their homes, in different time zones, and we support each other in adjusting to our unique life circumstances while still being effective as a team. We are committed to delivering a great customer experience via agile development and being data-driven.

We will consider candidates in any of Microsoft’s US locations, as well as for full-time remote work!

Responsibilities

Work directly with engineering team and PM team to ensure customer commitments for each release are met with high quality and predictable cadence.

Manage a team of vendors to help drive deployment activities for the service world-wide.

Coordinate closely with the PM team to ensure customer commitments for each release are met.

Manage risks and resolve issues that affect release scope, schedule and quality. 

Define and facilitate release criteria, drive release quality metrics improvements.

Facilitate the definition and completion of release criteria for major milestones. 

Define and evolve existing frameworks for project planning, execution, and release activities.

Build and maintain project health dashboards to surface metrics that can be used across various stakeholder communities to support data-driven decisions.

Improve the software engineering processes and practices associated with continuously building, deploying, and updating software.

Manage relationships and coordinate work between different teams at different locations.

Communicate current release status and release process improvements in a timely manner.

Qualifications

8+ years of Product/Program Management, quality assurance or software development experience with proven success in delivering critical services. 

Strong background in cloud and enterprise services or applications. 

Strong program management, project management and cross-group collaboration skills. 

Exceptional Project Management and Organization Skills. You are detailed and organized. You endeavor to never let anything fall through the cracks. You are clear, concise, and specific. You track and ensure that release data is 100% accurate. 

Solid understanding of engineering systems (work & code management, build, validation, deployment, instrumentation), service operations at scale, and ability to go deep in technical areas.

BS or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical experience.

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.