Release Manager

About AppDirect

Become a digital, global citizen and enable the new generation of digital entrepreneurs around the world.  AppDirect offers a subscription commerce platform to sell any product, through any channel, on any device - as a service.  We power millions of subscriptions worldwide for organizations.  We do this by our values-driven culture—one that enables you to Be Seen, Be Yourself, and Do Your Best Work.

What you’ll do and how you’ll have an impact

• Create monthly operations reports and attend monthly Operations meetings as required and presenting upcoming releases plans.
• Attend Weekly Sync meeting and report on outstanding operations issues as required
• Attend monthly sync meetings.
• Attend infrastructure change meetings with external vendors as required and ensure high priority changes are getting visibility with Engineering, QA, or Production Engineering teams at AppDirect. further ensure JIRA's created and completed as required.
• Coordinate infrastructure changes as required (usually not a result of a CR) such as additional language translations, certificate expiry, increasing performance of environments, etc.
• Track all infrastructure changes made to customer environments
• Manage and coordinate changes to customer environments including create or review release notes, create or update release sheets, confirm versions of releases going to be pushed and pushed to environments.
• Ensure communication (notifications) between the team, customer support, and the customer concerning changes are done within the expected advance notice.
• Work with Production Engineering and DTS Engineering to determine what what changes are to go to production environments and when
• Review load tests results to ensure system performance is likely not to be impacted or work with teams to determine how best to mitigate any issues
• Work with other groups in AppDirect to help ensure customer reported issues are resolved in a timely manner (e.g. SSO issues, marketplace issues, etc.)
• Ensure customer reported issues are followed up on or escalated appropriately.
• Coordinate Yearly PEN testing on customer environments as required.
• Organize and Coordinate Bi-Annual DR Fail-Over tests.
• Prioritize and manage the backlog to determine what issues should be prioritized and in which release.  This includes operations/backlog tickets sprint planning.
• Triage customer support issues reported to the team and escalate to the appropriate engineering team as required.
• Review, document, and continuously improve operations processes and communicate changes to those processes with the team.
• Approve time sheets for any operations related tasks
• Review ad-hoc requests from customers which are not reported as customer support requests and respond or escalate appropriately including GDPR requests.
• Ensure a strong relationship and understanding of processes with the customer support team.
• Be able to respond to customer support escalation requests as required to determine who can look at high severity issues.
• Ensure issues that may impact the operations of a customer are escalated appropriately (vulnerabilities to services based on technology, end of life of services)
• Ensure documentation (logical and physical infrastructure diagrams are kept up to date).
• Create SWAT team meetings to look into high priority production issues to come up with resolutions or workaround.
• Help coordinate migration of services as required.
• Ensure SLA's with customers are being met or make sure potential issues are resolved or prioritized.
• Periodically look at the production environments and create JIRA for issues in the logs that are problematic and prioritize.
• Coordinate operations related training plans with the appropriate teams (internal and external)
• Review project plans and cost estimates to ensure operational requirements are taken into consideration.
• Help investigate and document high priority customer related issues.
• Create SOW's and effort estimates for operation related projects.
• Ensure individuals are allocated to operations tasks as required in Open Air.
• Work with sales and CSM to determine if ad-hoc requests are to be paid for by the customer or included in the operation support costs.
• Investigate alternatives or improvements to existing operations tools (logging, reporting, alarming).
• Report on monthly AWS costs for environments
• Review access for individuals to all production environments and system credentials/accounts monthly.

At AppDirect, we believe that innovation thrives in an environment that houses diversity of excellence, experience and thought. We respect each AppDirector as their own fingerprint; unique with no one alike. We foster an environment of inclusion without regard to race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity enabling AppDirectors to embrace their uniqueness to do their best work. As such, we strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities, and/or people with intersectional identities.