Technical Engineer III / Release Manager

Job Title: Technical Engineer III / Release Manager

Location: Buffalo, NY

Hire Type: Contingent

Pay Range: $65.00/hour

Work Type: Full-time

Work Model: Onsite

Work Schedule: Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm

Recruiter Contact: Samantha Marranca | [email protected]

Nature & Scope:

Positional Overview

The Imagine Group is recruiting for a Technical Engineer III on behalf of our client, a leading financial institution in Buffalo, New York , serving individuals, businesses, and communities across the eastern United States. Known for its strong regional presence, commitment to community engagement, and focus on long-term customer relationships, the organization offers a stable and collaborative work environment with opportunities for growth

In this role, you will coordinate enterprise software releases from planning through production validation, ensuring release readiness, change-management compliance, and reliable deployments. You will work across application development, infrastructure, database, security, and business teams while executing and maintaining CI/CD deployment pipelines.

Role & Responsibility:

Tasks That Will Lead to Your Success

• Own and maintain enterprise release calendars and coordinate frequent, sometimes overlapping, production releases across applications, infrastructure, databases, security, and vendors.
• Lead release readiness reviews to verify testing, SDLC deliverables, approvals, implementation procedures, rollback plans, support readiness, and complete audit evidence.
• Coordinate deployment windows, technical resources, dependencies, competing schedules, and risk mitigation across multiple engineering and business teams.
• Follow strict change-management governance, ensure appropriate change records and approvals, and escalate release risks or control gaps.
• Organize and lead deployment bridges, coordinate code promotion to production, arrange post-deployment validation, and confirm successful closure of releases and changes.
• Execute, administer, troubleshoot, and maintain GitLab and Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines; update pipeline configurations, deployment targets, and servers as needed.
• Use Git-based version control, branching and code-promotion strategies, and PowerShell or comparable scripting to support controlled, repeatable deployments.
• Support the transition from on-premises deployment pipelines to Azure-based pipelines and collaborate with engineering and SRE teams on deployment reliability.
• Communicate release plans, implementation status, changes, incidents, and business impacts clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Conduct post-release reviews, analyze deployment incidents, document lessons learned, and improve release processes, automation, and operational stability.
• Work independently in a small release-management team supporting a large engineering organization; occasionally provide backup support for evening production deployments.
• Adhere to applicable risk, regulatory, security, audit, and internal control requirements; complete other related duties as assigned.

Skills & Experience

Qualifications That Will Help You Thrive

• Combined minimum of 6 years of higher education and/or relevant work experience in systems design, management, architecture, or related technical disciplines.
• Approximately 5–8+ years of enterprise release engineering, release management, DevOps, or platform engineering experience.
• Proven ownership of production release planning, coordination, readiness, execution, change governance, and post-deployment validation.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab and/or Azure DevOps, Git branching and code promotion, and CI/CD pipeline execution, administration, maintenance, and troubleshooting.
• Strong cross-functional communication, stakeholder coordination, prioritization, and ability to manage multiple concurrent releases.

Education & Experience Preferred

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, IT, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience supporting Azure cloud-based deployments and migration of on-premises CI/CD pipelines to Azure.
• PowerShell scripting and deployment automation; familiarity with infrastructure as code and cloud-native delivery patterns.
• Experience with release calendars, change tickets, rollback procedures, audit artifacts, production support, and release incident reviews.
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated enterprise environment.
• Knowledge of cross-system dependencies involving application, database, network, infrastructure, and security changes.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, facilitation, influencing, troubleshooting, and analytical problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently, collaborate across teams without direct reporting authority, and adapt in a high-volume release environment.
• Able to learn quickly in a rapid pace environment.