Cluster Release Manager

Project overview

This contract role leads release management across as many as five parallel projects, coordinating release plans, dependencies, risks, environments, and stakeholders with a Release Coordinator and multiple suppliers. The strongest candidates will have at least eight years of IT delivery experience in complex banking or financial services environments, with a track record managing multi-project release trains through SIT and UAT in regulated settings. Private banking or wealth management knowledge, strong SDLC understanding, and familiarity with JIRA or comparable ALM tools are central to the role.

The description calls for a university degree; German or another language in addition to English is beneficial, and weekend work may be required. The location is Zurich and the employment type is contract; work mode is not specified. The supplied experience band of 8–10 years is consistent with the description’s minimum of eight years.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for the Release Management discipline for up to 5 projects in parallel (together with Release Coordinator)
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive release plan aligned with delivery timelines, dependencies, risk profiles, and environment availability.
• Coordinate all aspects of release management execution across multiple projects and suppliers, ensuring alignment with enterprise change management principles
• Chair regular release coordination meetings with stakeholders to track progress, resolve blockers, and manage risks.
• Ensure full traceability from requirements → design → development → test cases → defects → deployments, leveraging tools such as JIRA, Confluence, or similar ALM platforms.
• Oversee the dependencies and risks related to releases in scope being deployed to the environments
• Oversee staging and promotion of code and configuration changes into environments collaborating closely with Environment Management.
• Monitor release health via KPIs such as defect leakage, regression pass rate, rollback frequency, and deployment success rates.
• Prepare reporting on release status, risks, and key milestones for Release Management Leadership
• Support readiness assessments prior to each test cycle and contribute to lessons learned after each release.
• Worked in a similar role before
• Experience in adjusting processes to programmes need

Requirements

• Release management experience in small- to mid-sized transformation projects
• At least 8 years of IT project delivery experience in complex banking or financial services organisations
• Managing multi-project release trains across SIT and UAT cycles in regulated environments
• Banking experience and understanding of private banking products
• Release planning, including delivery timelines, dependencies, risks, and environment availability
• Coordinating release execution across projects, suppliers, and stakeholders
• Release traceability across requirements, design, development, test cases, defects, and deployments using JIRA, Confluence, or similar ALM platforms
• Understanding of SDLC methodologies including Waterfall, Agile, SAFe, and hybrid models
• University degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or a related field

Project details

• Start: flexible
• Remote: hybrid
• Location: Switzerland, CH