Software Engineer III (Sr Release Manager)Hybrid

Title: Software Engineer III (Sr Release Manager) 

Location: Beaverton, OR

Duration: 13 months contract

NIKE, Inc. does more than outfit the world's best athletes. It is a place to explore potential, obliterate boundaries and push out the edges of what can be. The company looks for people who can grow, think, dream and create. Its culture thrives by embracing diversity and rewarding imagination. The brand seeks achievers, leaders and visionaries. At Nike, it’s about each person bringing skills and passion to a challenging and constantly evolving game.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR?

As a Sr Release Manager you will be an integral part of the team that enables Nike to bring its world-class products and experiences to market. You will work across a number of capabilities to understand portfolio roadmaps, programs, and key value drops. In true Nike fashion, you will partner closely with teams including program, product, engineering, release engineering, and quality to not only execute releases, but continually improve process, achieve efficiencies, and deliver a quality product timely.

WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON

The Sr Release Managers will work alongside stakeholders to collaborate on direction, strategy, planning, prioritization, execution, and ongoing drive of the global change & release framework. The Sr Release Manager is also responsible for driving operational strategies, including:

• Driving effective release framework and governance with a continuous delivery mindset across multiple teams and geographies
• Manage all change activity from planning through testing, to deployment
• Develop risk management and contingency planning for releases of any size
•  Work with Support and Operation teams to ensure operational readiness for releases of any size
• Communicate effectively at multiple levels within the organization through written and verbal communication, both formal and informal
• Drive to a global release cadence that defines the release cycles, structures, and required oversight to deliver products and experiences to production
• Define, collect, and publish key metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of releases as well as areas of improvement for the Release management framework
• Partner closely and continually with product, program, quality, engineering, support, and release teams to align on scope, release cadence, delivery and support requirements
• Partner with the business and IT stakeholders to drive release scheduling decisions and mitigate risks
• Provide status reports to key internal/external stakeholders on key releases and programs
• Manage go/no-go, checkpoint, and retrospective meetings with release stakeholders
• Participate in Capability Stand Ups and PI Planning sessions to determine and plan for upcoming release scope.
• Identify and drive retrospective items to completion.
• Run release and change command centers to execute key releases and programs deploying to production
• Manage capacity planning through sprint planning ceremonies
• Execute key Technology strategies and priorities, delivering value-driven programs across the enterprise

WHO WILL YOU WORK WITH?

You will partner with Global Technology teams to cultivate collaboration, alignment and integrated planning and execution across all functions. You will have close partnership with the Portfolio, Product, Technology and Strategy functions. You will work closely to coordinate with other Technology teams on dependencies for cross-functional deployments.

CRITICAL SKILLS

• Functional expertise in driving change and delivering high quality results.
• Demonstrable experience operating in a complex, federated global organization with a geographically dispersed team.
• Experience at developing risk management and contingency planning for production changes
• Successful track record of applying operational readiness techniques to complex feature implementations
• Successful track record of partnership across organizations to build trust and achieve shared goals.
• Good communications and presentation skills. Able to communicate sophisticated and technical issues effectively and concisely to leadership.
• High professional standards and expectations for self and others.
• Professional stature and gravitas to collaborate with and influence team members with credibility and confidence.

WHAT YOU BRING

• Bachelor’s degree in Technology, Business, Engineering, or a related field; 2+ additional years of professional experience in lieu of a degree
• A deep understanding and practical application of standard release process(s), agile methodologies, and technical capabilities (including agile - lean, continuous delivery, SAFE, ITIL)
• Experience working with teams who use development and deployment automation tools in the software development and deployment lifecycle
• Strong relationship-building skills and experience working closely with leaders and cross-functional partners to deliver key strategic initiatives.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to motivate and influence others, negotiate during situational conflict, and establish the best forward path in the face of competing points of view.
• Ability to deal with ambiguity and work in a dynamic, results-oriented matrixed environment.
• Experience with tools such as JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow