Senior Director of Release Management

About the role

IFS is seeking a strategic leader to modernise the release ecosystem across Product and Technology. The role will shift release governance from manual, process‑heavy methods to a data‑driven, platform‑enabled model embedded directly in engineering workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute a long‑term release strategy covering product, service, emergency, security, platform, customer onboarding and AI/model releases.
• Embed release controls into developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines and platform capabilities, using policy‑as‑code and automated compliance checks.
• Establish risk‑based guardrails, release risk scoring and progressive deployment controls to minimise manual approvals.
• Shape AI‑native release practices for AI‑generated code, models and prompts.
• Own environment strategy, shared environment governance, readiness, utilisation and observability.
• Build release intelligence using telemetry and AI to predict deployment risks and readiness gaps.

Required profile

• 10+ years in software delivery, release management, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering or related fields.
• Proven experience modernising release and deployment governance in complex product or service environments.
• Strong stakeholder leadership with ability to influence product, engineering, security and operations leaders.
• Demonstrated change‑management capability to move teams to evidence‑based, platform‑enabled release practices.
• Strategic, data‑driven thinker comfortable with AI, security and engineering enablement.

Required skills

• CI/CD pipelines
• Progressive delivery and feature flags
• Deployment automation
• Policy‑as‑code and automated compliance
• Observability and telemetry
• SRE principles
• Cloud/SaaS platform operations
• AI‑native release management