Lead Release Manager

Career Area:
Technology, Digital and Data
Job Description:
Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.
When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.
Who is CAT Digital? What do we do?
Big machines require big thinking. Are you looking for your next big challenge?
Cat® Digital is the digital and technology arm of Caterpillar Inc., leveraging the latest technologies to build industry leading digital solutions for our customers and dealers. With over one million connected assets worldwide, our teams use data, technology, advanced analytics, telematics, and AI capabilities to help our customers build a better world.
Working with a Fortune 100 leader, you can build your career on a global scale and take advantage of development opportunities with emerging technologies. We’ve created an inclusive environment for you to explore your passions, make an impact and do the work that really matters. Join Us.
Job Opportunity:
We are seeking talented individuals to join our team to help us grow our presence, organization, culture, which will drive our digital product development efforts. As a member of our team, you will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and collaborate with top professionals working on very high impact and visibility products. Don't miss this chance to join and support digital innovation for a global leader in heavy machinery!
What you will do:
As a Lead Release Manager, you will join our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization and lead the release operating model across multiple products and platforms. You will coordinate engineering, SRE, operations, quality, product, and business stakeholders to enable reliable and predictable production deployments. You will establish release governance, drive readiness decisions, reduce operational risk, and improve delivery through standardization and automation. You will also:
Lead and continuously improve the end-to-end release management process across multiple digital products and services.
Plan and coordinate production releases, maintenance windows, hotfixes, and emergency deployments across distributed teams.
Lead release planning meetings, readiness reviews, and evidence-based go/no-go decisions.
Maintain release calendars and coordinate dependencies across teams, applications, platforms, and environments.
Define release readiness, entry and exit criteria, ownership, escalation paths, and governance standards.
Identify technical and operational risks early and drive mitigation, rollback, recovery, and contingency plans.
Coordinate post-release validation and ensure monitoring, support readiness, and operational documentation are in place.
Lead release retrospectives and root-cause reviews, converting lessons learned into measurable process improvements.
Define and track release metrics, including success rate, frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery outcomes.
Drive automation and standardization of build, test, deployment, validation, and reporting through CI/CD practices.
Partner with engineering and SRE teams to improve reliability, scalability, observability, and production readiness.
Coordinate release communications and support incident response during critical deployments and production issues.
Influence cross-functional teams without direct authority and provide clear status, risk, dependency, and decision visibility to leadership.
What you have:
Customer Focus: Knowledge of the values and practices that align customer needs and satisfaction as primary considerations in all business decisions and ability to leverage that information in creating customized customer solutions.
Systems Software Infrastructure: Knowledge of computer architecture and system software interaction; ability to design and build a fundamental architecture of operating systems, database management systems, communications protocols, compilers and other development tools
Customer Focus: Knowledge of customer needs and business priorities; ability to balance delivery outcomes with platform reliability and operational risk.
Release Leadership: Demonstrated experience leading complex software releases across multiple teams, services, environments, and stakeholders.
Software Delivery Lifecycle: Strong understanding of SDLC, Agile delivery, cloud-native applications, automated testing, environment management, and production operations.
CI/CD and Automation: Experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar platforms, and the ability to improve delivery automation and repeatability.
Cloud and Technical Understanding: Experience managing releases in AWS or Azure environments and working knowledge of APIs, distributed systems, containers, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code.
Risk and Decision Making: Ability to assess complex technical and operational risks, enable timely decisions, and establish mitigation, rollback, and recovery strategies.
Cross-functional Coordination: Experience working with Software Engineering, SRE, DevOps, Quality Engineering, Product Management, Security, Architecture, and Operations.
Communication and Influence: Strong stakeholder management, facilitation, negotiation, and executive communication skills, including the ability to drive outcomes without direct authority.
Continuous Improvement: Ability to use release outcomes, incidents, metrics, and operational feedback to improve release controls, delivery velocity, and reliability.
Top candidates will also have:
Experience establishing or improving release governance for large-scale eCommerce, digital platforms, or customer-facing applications.
ITIL Foundation, DevOps, cloud, or equivalent professional certification or practical experience.
Experience supporting globally distributed engineering teams and leading major, business-critical, or cross-platform releases.
What we offer:
At Cat Digital, we are committed to fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning, and we believe in investing in the development of our employees. As a member of our team, you will have access to a wide range of training and development opportunities, as well as very competitive compensation