Workday Release Manager

Role Overview

The Workday Release Manager will own the end-to-end release management lifecycle for the global Workday platform, ensuring that Workday product releases, enhancements, country deployments, integrations, and production changes are planned, tested, governed, and deployed with minimal business disruption.

The role will act as the central coordination point across HR, Payroll, Workday Functional teams, Integrations, Security, QA, AMS partners, Business stakeholders, and Technology teams.

The role will manage both Workday biannual releases (R1/R2) and ongoing Workday changes, while ensuring alignment with country go-lives, payroll cycles, project deployments, and production support activities.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8 - 12+ years of IT / Release / Program Management experience.
• 5+ years of experience working with Workday.
• Strong experience managing Workday R1/R2 releases.
• Strong understanding of Workday tenant and environment management.
• Experience with Workday HCM and preferably Payroll.
• Good understanding of Workday integrations and data flows.
• Experience managing large-scale regression testing.
• Strong knowledge of release/change management processes.
• Experience with CAB, Go/No-Go, RAID, risk and dependency management.
• Experience working with global teams and multiple geographies.
• Strong stakeholder and vendor management skills.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and leadership skills.

Preferred Skills

• Workday certification / Workday Pro experience.
• ITIL / SAFe / Agile certification.
• Experience with ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps or similar tools.
• Experience with Workday Community and release documentation.
• Experience with Workday Customer Central / deployment tools.
• Experience with test automation tools such as Kainos SmartTest.
• Experience managing Workday implementations and global country rollouts.