Release Manager

Our Mission: Qblox is a deep-tech scaleup headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, with a second office in Boston. We provide advanced quantum control stacks to research labs, quantum startups, and industry leaders. As we scale our highly complex, multi-disciplinary products, we need robust operational leadership to ensure seamless delivery.

Your Mission: Owning End-to-End Delivery We're hiring a (Senior) Release Manager, based in the PMO, to own end-to-end release coordination across FPGA, embedded software, software packages, and documentation.

This is a full-time, high-impact role with absolute authority over the release process and go/no-go decisions across every contributing team, regardless of their department. Seniority matters here: you need the credibility and executive presence to set and enforce rigorous release discipline with department heads on an equal footing.

Key Responsibilities

• Release Authority & Planning
• Release Decisions: Define release-readiness criteria, run gate reviews, and make the ultimate go/no-go call. While you have full authority over the release itself, department heads will maintain full authority over their people, technical decisions, and resourcing.
• Calendar & Requirements: Own the release calendar, dictating what each component must deliver, in what state, and by when (leaving the internal methodology, tooling, and branching up to the teams).
• Boundary Definition (RACI): Co-define exact authority boundaries with the CTO, PMO, and component leads to ensure seamless operation.
• Cross-Functional Coordination & Visibility
• Single Point of Contact: Act as the definitive point of coordination across component release managers and the integration lead.
• Hardware Dependency Management: Track hardware revisions and availability as a critical release dependency, coordinating with the hardware team so releases are accurately planned against confirmed hardware readiness.
• Risk Escalation & Tradeoffs: Surface cross-component risks early and work closely with Product on scope tradeoffs when a component is not ready as planned.
• Live Visibility: Maintain an accurate, live view of release readiness across all components and chair cross-component readiness reviews.
• Process Excellence & Coaching
• Coaching & Standards: Set a high bar for what it means to be "release-ready" and develop component release managers to consistently meet that standard.
• Metrics & Dashboards: Coordinate a global release dashboard pulling in readiness data from each component and from integration tests.
• Documentation Focus: Treat documentation as a fully tracked release stream with its own readiness criteria, ensuring it is never treated as an afterthought.

Required Experience

• Complex Release Management: Strong track record managing releases across multiple interdependent teams, ideally spanning hardware, firmware, and software.
• Process Leadership: Experience running strict release readiness and gate processes, going far beyond standard status reporting.
• Mentorship: Experience coaching release practices in people who do not formally report to you.

Core Competencies

• Technical Grounding: Solid technical understanding across embedded software, firmware, and hardware release cycles—enough to evaluate readiness claims and challenge component teams credibly, without needing to be hands-on in any single discipline.
• Stakeholder Management: Exceptional stakeholder management skills, with the proven ability to coordinate and influence without formal authority over most people.
• Process Enforcement: A proven ability to set, manage, and enforce processes with teams outside your direct reporting line.
• Adaptability: Highly comfortable driving clarity and moving forward from incomplete or evolving information.

Why Join Qblox?

• Impact: Take on a central operational leadership role with direct authority over how our cutting-edge technology reaches the market.
• Innovation: Work at the absolute cutting edge of technology, solving complex integration challenges in the quantum ecosystem.
• Growth: Be part of a fast-moving, high-performance team with significant opportunities to define operational excellence as we scale globally.