Program Manager - Release

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Release Manager to own and drive the end-to-end release and deployment lifecycle for Juspay's core Express Checkout product — a high-scale, high-availability payments system built on microservices. This role sits at the intersection of Engineering, DevOps, Product, and QA, and is expected to be hands-on: driving deployments, monitoring rollouts, running experiments, and ensuring every release is validated, well-coordinated, and delivered reliably at scale.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth in deployment engineering and observability with proven experience managing complex, high-frequency releases across many independently deployable services.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end deployment management for all microservices powering Express Checkout, across multiple engineering teams.
• Define release strategy, timelines, quality gates, readiness criteria, and go/no-go processes.
• Design and manage progressive rollout strategies (canary, blue-green, staged rollouts) and run A/B tests to validate feature and performance changes before full production release.
• Partner closely with Engineering, QA, Product, and DevOps to plan, sequence, and execute releases across interdependent services.
• Drive functional, regression, integration, API, performance, and end-to-end testing across releases.
• Build and monitor release/deployment dashboards (Grafana or equivalent) to track health, latency, error rates, and rollout progress in real time.
• Query and analyze release, performance, and product metrics using SQL, ClickHouse, and BigQuery to inform go/no-go decisions and post-release health checks.
• Track and manage release risks, dependencies, blockers, and mitigation plans.
• Coordinate production deployments, release validation, rollback plans, and post-release monitoring.
• Establish and monitor release quality metrics, including defect leakage, release stability, automation coverage, deployment success rates, and A/B test outcomes.
• Identify bottlenecks in the deployment pipeline and drive improvements in tooling, automation, testing, and CI/CD workflows (Jenkins and related systems).
• Lead release retrospectives and work with teams to implement corrective and preventive actions.
• Maintain release documentation, deployment checklists, release notes, and governance processes.
• Act as the central point of coordination during critical or high-impact releases, including incident response and rollback decisions.

What We're Looking For

• 5–7 years of experience in Release Management, DevOps, Deployment Engineering, or a closely related engineering function, ideally in a microservices environment.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience owning production deployments for microservices at scale — not just coordinating release schedules.
• Practical experience designing and running A/B tests / experiments as part of feature rollout and release validation.
• Working proficiency in SQL, and hands-on experience querying analytical data stores such as ClickHouse and BigQuery.
• Hands-on experience with Grafana (or equivalent observability tools) for building dashboards and monitoring production releases.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD and release tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar platforms.
• Deep understanding of SDLC, testing methodologies, release management, and software quality practices.
• Strong technical understanding of APIs, distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines, version control, and production environments.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to drive decisions and coordinate teams during high-pressure releases.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, planning, and communication skills.
• Experience working in Agile/product development environments with frequent and iterative releases.

Good to Have

• Experience in fintech, payments, or checkout/transaction systems specifically — familiarity with payment flows, PSP integrations, and checkout funnel metrics.
• Experience with test automation frameworks and quality engineering practices.
• Knowledge of performance testing, reliability testing, and chaos/resilience testing.
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, incident management, and engineering productivity tools.

Key Skills

Release Management • Microservices Deployment • A/B Testing & Experimentation • CI/CD (Jenkins) • Grafana & Observability • SQL • ClickHouse • BigQuery • Test Strategy & Automation • Risk & Dependency Management • Stakeholder Management • Incident & Rollback Management • Agile/Scrum

What Success Looks Like

• Microservice releases for Express Checkout are deployed predictably, on schedule, and with minimal production issues.
• A/B tests and staged rollouts are used consistently to de-risk feature and performance changes before full release.
• Clear quality gates and release readiness criteria are consistently followed across teams.
• Engineering and Product stakeholders have real-time visibility into release progress, risks, and dependencies via dashboards.
• Production defects and release-related incidents are continuously reduced through better testing, monitoring, and automation.
• The deployment process becomes faster, more reliable, and increasingly automated.