Mastercard is a global leader in payments technology, operating in over 200 countries and territories. We are dedicated to building a sustainable economy where everyone can thrive. Our mission is to facilitate secure, simple, and accessible digital payments, leveraging innovative technology and strategic partnerships to empower individuals, businesses, and governments.

We are seeking a seasoned Lead Software Release Manager to orchestrate end-to-end release processes for a portfolio of 7-8 interconnected software products and platforms. This pivotal role involves creating and maintaining an integrated release calendar that harmonizes product roadmaps, engineering capacity, testing environments, customer needs, regulatory mandates, and inter-program dependencies. The ideal candidate will excel in complex, enterprise-level environments requiring meticulous coordination among diverse teams, systems, and stakeholders for successful, high-quality software delivery. You will be the central hub for release readiness, dependency tracking, environment management, and deployment execution.

As the Lead Software Release Manager, you will own the enterprise release calendar for 7-8 products and platforms. This includes developing and maintaining integrated release schedules that encompass development milestones, integration testing, pre-production validation, performance testing, production deployment windows, and customer onboarding.

You will coordinate release trains and major program increments across multiple teams, skillfully balancing competing priorities to optimize release frequency and stability. Identifying, documenting, and proactively managing dependencies—whether product-to-product, program-to-program, infrastructure-related, or with external partners and customers—will be crucial.

Furthermore, you will govern the utilization of critical testing and deployment environments, coordinate environment reservations, and ensure their readiness. Establishing clear release entry and exit criteria, conducting readiness reviews, and verifying functional, integration, performance, security, and operational readiness are key. You will ensure adherence to change management and release governance processes, partnering closely with engineering, product management, quality assurance, SRE, infrastructure, customer delivery, and operations teams.

Communicating release plans, risks, and status to both technical and executive audiences, driving alignment across globally distributed teams, and identifying/mitigating risks will be essential. You will also define and monitor release management KPIs to continuously improve processes and tooling.

A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field is required. We are looking for a minimum of 8 years of experience in software delivery, technical program management, release management, or engineering operations, with at least 5 years focused on managing enterprise-scale software releases.

Demonstrated experience coordinating releases across multiple products and engineering teams simultaneously is essential. A strong understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Agile and Scrum methodologies, DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and change/release management processes is expected. You should possess proven experience managing complex dependency chains and cross-functional delivery programs, coupled with robust project planning, organization, and risk-management skills.

Exceptional executive communication and stakeholder management capabilities are critical for this role. Preferred qualifications include experience with large-scale distributed systems or payment-processing platforms, coordinating releases across globally distributed teams, and familiarity with tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, XL Release/Digital.ai Release, Splunk, and Confluence. Certifications like PMP, PMI-ACP, SAFe, ITIL, or DevOps are a plus, as is experience supporting highly regulated or mission-critical production environments.