Head of Release and Deployment Management

In a nutshell
As a Head of Release and Deployment Management, you will be accountable for the safe, predictable, and scalable delivery of changes across a growing portfolio of GSC IT Solutions. Your role will be key in governing the end-to-end Release lifecycle across more than 500 Production instances in target, ensuring that IT Applications, infrastructure and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Releases reach Production securely and without disruption to Business Operations. Combining technical ownership, operational leadership, and cross-functional coordination, your role will be critical to service continuity, deployment quality, regulatory compliance, and the organisation ability to deliver change at scale.
Where will you be based and what business will you support?
Based in Braga, Portugal; you will join a globally distributed team in the Food and Environment Testing.
How can you help us?
You will work on the following areas:
Release & Deployment Execution, to:
Execute and manage end-to-end deployments across non-production and production environments.
Maintain and optimise deployment pipelines, technical configurations, and automation scripts.
Actively troubleshoot deployment failures, analyse root causes, and have fixes tested and implemented.
Ensure all Releases meet quality, security, and operational standards.
Technical Ownership, to:
Own deployment tooling (CI/CD pipelines, Release orchestration tools).
Raise new requirements to the Automation team, test and follow-up on their deliveries to ensure best-in-class tooling for the Release team.
Ensure technical pre-requisites are implemented and validated before any Release deployment as per Release Notes.
Optimise technical configurations maintenance and maintainability.
Participate in incident resolution related to deployments and technical configuration.
Coordination & Governance, to:
Coordinate Release schedules and dependencies across multiple teams.
Ensure compliance with ITIL Change Management process.
Drive clear communication between technical teams and business stakeholders.
Anticipate and mitigate risks, unblock proactively challenging situations with Product teams or Business stakeholders.
Continuous Improvement, to:
Identify and implement improvements in deployment processes, automation, and tooling.
Improve cost efficiency of the team, looking at tooling performance, scalability and reliability.
Contribute to standardisation across a large and growing IT Applications landscape.
Promote DevOps best practices and automation-first mindset.
Enhance and document Release & Deployment processes and evangelise Business representatives.
Are you our kind of extraordinary?
You have:
A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, or Information Management, or equivalent experience.
8–10 years of experience in Release engineering, deployment management, or DevOps-oriented roles
Proven experience in hands-on deployment execution and troubleshooting.
Leadership experience, working in complex, international, large-scale IT ecosystems.
Strong practical knowledge in several of the following areas:
Cloud Platform: Microsoft Azure
CI/CD & Deployment Tools: Azure DevOps Pipelines, Octopus Deploy, Terraform Cloud
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (or equivalent)
ITSM Tools: ServiceNow, BMC Helix, Jira
Monitoring & Observability: Grafana (or equivalent)
You are:
A doer, not only a coordinator.
Able to diagnose issues quickly and fix them.
Driven to automate, optimise, and scale.
Organised, structured, adaptable in complex environments.
A good blend of technical, process and people management skills.

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
Hybrid