The Walt Disney Company · 4 hours ago
Lead Release Manager
Celebration, FL
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
7+ years expThe Walt Disney Company is a leading entertainment and media enterprise, and they are seeking a Lead Release Manager to oversee the end-to-end release lifecycle for a multi-service operating platform. This role involves establishing release governance, managing risk, and ensuring compliance while coordinating change enablement and promoting continuous improvement within the organization.
Amusement Park and ArcadeAnimationConsumer GoodsDigital MediaE-CommerceMedia and EntertainmentMulti-level MarketingPerforming ArtsResorts
Responsibilities
The Lead Release Manager owns the end‑to‑end release lifecycle for a multi‑service, multi-experience operating platform
The role establishes and enforces release governance (calendar, gates, approvals, evidence), coordinates change enablement, manages risk and rollback readiness, and harmonizes fast flow with safe operations
Publish and run the platform release calendar (sprint alignment, scope‑lock, certification checkpoints, freeze/blackout windows)
Define and administer Release Independence Tiers (Cadenced / Independent Deployment / Fully Independent) with objective criteria and onboarding/audit routines
Chair/co‑chair CAB/CCB; ensure risk‑based approvals and complete, auditable change records (plan, tests, evidence, rollback)
Uphold SOX/PCI evidence and production certification standards (security, performance, accessibility)
Enforce non‑functional gates: performance budgets, vulnerability thresholds, error budgets/SLOs, accessibility checks
Require runbooks, rollback plans, on‑call escalation paths, and environment choreography (data/config/flags) before go‑live
Codify standards for flag governance (naming, environments, permissions, audit) to decouple deployment from release
Operate dark launches (backend toggles without UI exposure), progressive percentage rollouts with automated halt/rollback rules, and guarded/kill‑switch policies tied to health/business KPIs (e.g: LaunchDarkly)
Coordinate targeted/cohort rollouts (e.g.: Statsig) and A/B / multivariate tests (e.g.:Split/Statsig) with product/analytics; you own guardrails and decision checkpoints
Standardize artifact promotion paths (dev → test → stage → prod), canary/soak durations, and go/no‑go criteria. Determine timely needs of ephemeral environments to enable fast flow delivery
Keep authoritative release notes and ensure observability is wired to release decisioning dashboards and incident workflows
Treat feature toggles and rollbacks as first‑line mitigations; run command‑center operations for major events and execute rehearsed procedures
Lead blameless post‑mortems; fold findings into standards, automation, and checklists
Track and publish DORA metrics (e.g.: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and policy compliance (% gates passed, audit completeness)
Use data to optimize cadence, tiering, gate thresholds, and calendar patterns; drive platform‑wide improvement backlogs
Provide transparent comms to engineering, ops/SRE, product, security/compliance, and executives; manage escalations on schedule/quality trade‑offs and coordinate around high‑traffic windows
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)
7+ years in Release/Change Management for large, distributed systems; 3+ years leading multi‑team/platform releases
Demonstrated implementation of ITIL v4 Change Enablement processes and audit‑ready evidence (e.g.: SOX/PCI)
Proven application of DORA‑driven continuous improvement and SRE practices (SLOs/error budgets, canary/soak, blameless post‑mortems)
Hands‑on with CI/CD (e.g.: GitHub Actions, Harness, Azure DevOps, Jenkins), artifact repositories, automated testing, and security scanning
Practical expertise with feature flags & experimentation: e.g.: LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Split (progressive/targeted rollouts, kill‑switches, KPI gating)
Cloud & containers (e.g.: AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes), GitOps deployment (e.g.: ArgoCD/Spinnaker)
Observability and APM stacks (e.g.: Splunk Observability, AppDynamics, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana) integrated with release health and decisioning
Excellence in facilitation, executive communication, risk‑based decision‑making, and cross‑portfolio coordination
Strong documentation discipline (release notes, CAB/CCB artifacts, runbooks, rollback evidence)
Preferred
Led CAB/CCB programs with published calendars and portfolio visibility (e.g.: Smartsheet/Jira/Teams/SharePoint)
Certifications: ITIL v4, SAFe (RTE exposure), PSM II/A‑CSM, AWS/Azure/GCP, PCI ISA
Background in SRE and inclusive/performance‑focused engineering (accessibility and performance budgets embedded in gates)
Master's degree preferred (e.g., MS in CS/IS/Software Engineering) or relevant advanced coursework in DevOps/SRE/ITIL
Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company started as a cartoon studio and evolves into sports coverage and television shows.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
The Walt Disney Company has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (83)
2024 (63)
2023 (96)
2022 (130)
2021 (30)
2020 (40)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$11BKey Investors
Citibank
2020-04-13Post Ipo Debt· $5B
2020-03-20Post Ipo Debt· $6B
1978-01-06IPO
Leadership Team
Robert Iger
CEO
Christine M. McCarthy
Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2026-01-20
Company data provided by crunchbase