Manager, Software Engineering & Release Management

Overview:

We’re seeking an Engineering Manager who stays close to the code—someone who can lead a team of software engineers, take ownership of the release process for one or more product lines, and thrive in a FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC Level 2 environment where change control and audit readiness are built into the day-to-day work. In this role, you’ll lead a team of software engineers, own the full release lifecycle for one or more product lines, and partner closely with Product Management, QA, and platform teams across Exostar’s broader R&D organization.

This role intentionally combines responsibilities that are often split across multiple positions. Our Engineering Managers are deeply connected to execution: running go/no-go release decisions with real technical context, confidently approving change tickets, and helping engineers resolve technical blockers—not just managing backlogs and tracking velocity. You’ll actively use AI coding tools—such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot—every day and set the expectation for your team to do the same. AI-native development isn’t optional at Exostar; its core to how we build.

This role reports to the Director, R&D Engineering and operates within Exostar’s FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC Level 2 environment serving defense primes including Boeing and BAE Systems.

What You’ll Own:

Engineering Delivery

• Lead a team of software engineers building production features across Exostar’s identity, credentialing, and supply chain security platform.
• Own the technical quality of your team’s output — architecture decisions, PR reviews, code quality, and production reliability.
• Drive sprint execution: planning, backlog refinement, dependency management, and delivery against committed milestones.
• Identify and resolve blockers before they become delays — escalate when needed but own the outcome.
• Establish and maintain engineering metrics: deployment frequency, change failure rate, cycle time, defect escape rate.

Release Management

• Own the release calendar and cadence across your product line(s) -from feature freeze through production deployment, hotfix, and post-release validation.
• Run release readiness reviews and go/no-go decisions: scope confirmation, test coverage, security scan results, open defect risk, rollback plan, and stakeholder sign-off.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies for releases that span engineering, QA, platform, security, and customer success — you are the single throat to choke on the release.
• Drive the change management process in our FedRAMP Moderate / CMMC L2 environment: change tickets, approver routing, separation-of-duties enforcement, and audit-grade evidence capture.
• Own deployment pipelines and release gates in Azure DevOps — promotion criteria, environment parity (dev/test/staging/prod/gov), automated quality gates, and manual approval points.
• Manage feature flags, canary rollouts, blue/green deploys, and dark launches; default to safer release strategies whenever they’re available.
• Coordinate release notes, internal stakeholder comms, and customer-facing release communications with product and marketing.
• Own post-release reviews: track release health metrics (lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recover) and turn findings into durable process improvements.
• Own and rehearse rollback and incident response playbooks; lead release-related incident bridges when they occur.

AI-Native Engineering Leadership

• Use Claude Code and GitHub Copilot daily in your own workflow — not as optional productivity tools, as standard practice.
• Model AI-native development for your team: code generation, agentic workflows, AI-assisted PR review, and automated testing.
• Apply AI tooling to release management workflows: automated release-notes drafting, risk classification of incoming changes, regression-suite triage, and post-release retrospective synthesis.
• Drive adoption across your team: coach skeptics, celebrate early adopters, measure impact, and share learnings org-wide.
• Stay current on the AI tooling landscape — surface new tools and workflows to the Director when they’re worth evaluating.

Product & Roadmap Collaboration

• Partner with product managers to translate roadmap priorities into engineering scope and a credible release plan — push back on ambiguity, not on accountability.
• Participate in quarterly planning: capacity estimation, sequencing, release-window planning, and dependency identification across teams.
• Maintain clear line of sight from customer commitments through sprint execution to a specific release for your team.