Principal Release Engineer Complex Transformation

At F5, we strive to bring a better digital world to life. Our teams empower organizations across the globe to create, secure, and run applications that enhance how we experience our evolving digital world. We are passionate about cybersecurity, from protecting consumers from fraud to enabling companies to focus on innovation. 
 

Everything we do centers around people. That means we obsess over how to make the lives of our customers, and their customers, better. And it means we prioritize a diverse F5 community where each individual can thrive.

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Release & Environment Engineer to lead and orchestrate end-to-end release management, cutover planning, and environment strategy across large-scale, multi-platform enterprise transformation programs. This role will serve as the central point of coordination between multiple platform teams, SREs, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to ensure seamless, low-risk releases across a complex ecosystem including Salesforce, Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion Suite, Clarify, Azure, OIC, Boomi, APIGEE, Solace, Varicent, and other platforms.

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 Key Responsibilities

Release Management & Cutover Planning

- Own and drive the end-to-end release management lifecycle for complex, multi-platform transformation programs

- Develop and maintain a comprehensive release calendar coordinating deployments across all platforms (Salesforce, Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion, Clarify, Azure, Varicent, etc.)

- Design and execute detailed cutover plans including runbooks, rollback strategies, go/no-go checkpoints, and communication plans

- Lead cutover war rooms and serve as the primary orchestrator during major release events

- Establish release governance frameworks including release readiness reviews, change advisory boards, and approval workflows

- Define and track release KPIs/metrics (e.g., deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR)

 Environment Management & Strategy

- Design and implement an enterprise environment strategy encompassing DEV, SIT, UAT, Pre-Prod, Performance, Staging, and Production environments across all platforms

- Define and manage environment refresh strategies and schedules, including data masking/anonymization requirements

- Maintain a centralized environment inventory and calendar to manage environment availability, bookings, and conflict resolution

- Establish environmental provisioning and decommissioning standards and processes

- Ensure environmental parity and configuration consistency across lower and higher environments

- Manage environment-related dependencies, integrations, and data flows between platforms

 Cross-Platform Coordination & SRE Collaboration

- Serve as the primary liaison between SRE teams across multiple platforms, ensuring alignment on deployment windows, infrastructure readiness, and operational handoffs

- Coordinate with platform-specific release engineers (Salesforce admins, Oracle DBAs, Azure DevOps engineers, etc.) to synchronize interdependent releases

- Partner with SRE teams to define and enforce SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs for environmental uptime and release stability

- Drive infrastructure and environment readiness activities ahead of major releases

- Facilitate cross-team dependency mapping and impact analysis for integrated releases

 Process & Governance

- Establish and continuously improve release management frameworks aligned with ITIL, SAFe, or DevOps best practices

- Lead the technical roadmap for release engineering, making architectural decisions that impact the entire engineering organization
- Build tooling and frameworks that improve developer productivity, deployment velocity, and system reliability
- Establish release processes and standards that ensure safe, frequent deployments to production
- Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate release automation into their workflows
- Monitor and optimize build times, test execution, and deployment performance
- Design rollback strategies, feature flagging systems, and progressive delivery mechanisms

- Implement and maintain tooling and automation for release tracking, environment management, and deployment orchestration (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy, etc.)

- Drive adoption of CI/CD practices where applicable across the program landscape

- Conduct post-release reviews (PIRs) and drive continuous improvement actions

- Maintain comprehensive RACI matrices and process documentation

Required Qualifications

- 15+ years of experience in IT with at least 10+ years in Release Management, Environment Management, or related roles

- 8+ years of experience managing releases in complex, multi-platform enterprise transformation programs

- Demonstrated experience with 3 or more of the following platforms: Salesforce, Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion Suite/Cloud, Clarify, Microsoft Azure, Varicent (or similar SPM/ICM tools)

- Deep understanding of cutover planning and execution for large-scale, multi-workstream go-lives

- Strong experience in designing and managing environmental strategies across heterogeneous technology landscapes

- Proven track record of coordinating with SRE/DevOps/Infrastructure teams across multiple platforms

- Hands-on experience with release management and ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence)

- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code concepts

- Experience with cloud environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and hybrid on-premises/cloud architectures

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Preferred Qualifications

- ITIL v4 Foundation or higher certification

- SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) or SAFe Agilist certification

- PMP, PgMP, or similar project/program management certification

- Experience with ERP transformation programs (Oracle Cloud migration, S/4HANA, etc.)

- Familiarity with database refresh strategies for Oracle, SQL Server, and cloud databases

- Experience implementing release orchestration tools (e.g., Digital.ai, Plutora, Octopus Deploy, Harness)

- Background in financial services, telecom, or large enterprise environments

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Essential Soft Skills

- Exceptional communication – ability to translate technical release activities into executive-level status updates

- Strong stakeholder management – comfort working with program directors, platform leads, SREs, QA, and business users

- Calm under pressure – proven ability to lead high-stakes cutover events and make real-time go/no-go decisions

- Problem-solving mindset – ability to quickly triage environment and release issues across interconnected systems

- Organizational excellence – ability to manage multiple concurrent release streams and environment schedules

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 What Success Looks Like in This Role

Timeframe

Expected Outcomes

First 30 days

Understand the current landscape, platforms, teams, and pain points; establish relationships with all platform SREs and leads

First 60 days

Deliver an environment strategy document and release governance framework; establish a unified release calendar

First 90 days

Successfully orchestrate multi-platform release; implement environment refresh schedules; establish KPIs and reporting

Ongoing

Continuously reduce release risk, improve deployment frequency, and drive operational excellence across all platforms

The Job Description is intended to be a general representation of the responsibilities and requirements of the job. However, the description may not be all-inclusive, and responsibilities and requirements are subject to change.

The annual base pay for this position is: $186,400.00 - $279,600.00

F5 maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, geographic locations, and market conditions, as well as to reflect F5’s differing products, industries, and lines of business. The pay range referenced is as of the time of the job posting and is subject to change.

You may also be offered incentive compensation, bonus, restricted stock units, and benefits. More details about F5’s benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.f5.com/company/careers/benefits. F5 reserves the right to change or terminate any benefit plan without notice. 

Please note that F5 only contacts candidates through F5 email address (ending with @f5.com) or auto email notification from Workday (ending with f5.com or @myworkday.com).

Equal Employment Opportunity

It is the policy of F5 to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants without regard to unlawful considerations of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, sensory, physical, or mental disability, marital status, veteran or military status, genetic information, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, discipline, and termination.  F5 offers a variety of reasonable accommodations for candidates. Requesting an accommodation is completely voluntary. F5 will assess the need for accommodations in the application process separately from those that may be needed to perform the job. Request by contacting accommodations@f5.com.