Director, Release Management

As a Director of Release Management, you’ll play a key role in planning, coordinating, and executing software releases for our autonomous driving systems and connected services. You’ll work closely with release engineering, software developers, validation engineers, product operations, and stakeholders across the organization to ensure timely and high-quality software delivery to customers. You will be accountable for the roadmap to enable reliable and efficient software updates to hundreds and thousands of vehicles. You will set the vision for where the team needs to be in the future while simultaneously driving improvements day-to-day.

In this role, you will

• Define and drive broad alignment on the vision, requirements, and roadmap for safety critical software release process and associated infrastructure. 
• Implement and champion broad release process and tooling changes, ensuring they are broadly understood, robust, and executing efficiently. You are a go to process driver for release management processes across the company.
• Guide release managers in their partnership with release engineering, validation, and test teams to track releases through CI, simulation, on-road testing, and final deployment.
• Ensure software releases are shipping - moving through simulated and on road testing, verification and validation processes, and getting to an approved state, with high levels of confidence and stability. Collaborate with a wide range of teams across the company to get software release issues tracked to completion, including Software, Hardware, Product, Operations, and Safety. 
• Ensure the appropriate communication channels exist to track and broadly communicate product and feature release status, facilitate release readiness, release/change control reviews, and coordinate product release activities including formulation of clear and concise release notes.
• Work with our external partners (e.g. government relations, business development) and internal stakeholders (e.g. development teams, operations) to drive alignment on the release schedule.
• Proactively remove obstacles to drive momentum and progress, identify gaps in communication related to release management across the organization.
• Ensure release managers are effectively executing release readiness reviews and facilitating go/no-go decisions for production deployments.
• Support incident management and rollback planning related to software releases.

Required Qualifications

• 7-10+ years of experience in software release management or release engineering for complex systems with both software and hardware components.
• Have operated at the intersection of product delivery, customer needs, and release management.
• Strong organizational and communication skills, with experience tracking releases through development, test, and deployment phases.
• Experience with continuous integration and release automation systems (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub).
• Experience orchestrating cross-team efforts to address bugs and issues to resolution.
• Communication skills for a broad range of audiences: executives, individual engineers, larger technical teams, operations teams, external partners.

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience release engineering or release management for safety-critical systems.
• Familiarity with formal V&V (Verification & Validation) pipelines.
• Familiarity with safety and systems engineering best practices
• Familiarity with quality and safety standards for automotive, aerospace, or medical
• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning
• Experience with a monorepo based build tool such as Bazel
• Familiarity with modern cloud-based software development (AWS)
• Familiarity with modern web development technologies

The base salary range for this position is $235-$376K per year.  Aurora’s pay ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, the successful candidate’s starting base pay will be determined based on factors including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, relevant education or training, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future. The successful candidate will also be eligible for an annual bonus, equity compensation, and benefits.

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