Release Manager, Global Network Operations Center

Team Name:

IT – Network Operations

Job Title:

Release Manager, Global Network Operations Center

Requisition ID:

R026019

Job Description:

Your Mission 

At Blizzard Entertainment, Release Managers (RM) in our Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) work collaboratively with a wide cross section of departments to ensure smooth and stable launches of our titles, seasons, and special projects. Additionally, outside of these duties - Release Managers support the broader GNOC work: incident management, change management, problem management, and knowledge management functions that are required to keep Blizzard players in the game. A Release Manager records all issues, challenges, and barriers encountered during launches and works with partner teams to prevent similar problems in the future.

Blizzard's games and platforms reach a global audience of passionate gamers. The GNOC is the nexus point between our games, platforms, and all the teams dedicated to creating and supporting them. During launch windows, the Release Manager is responsible for providing continual support to game teams and partner teams to ensure release steps are being completed on time and without issue. Outside of launch windows, they are responsible for player and employee-facing services, as the Release Manager serves as both an on-call incident manager and incident analyst. The Release Manager will use data, metrics, and their analysis to work with OpsCenter management and recommend improvements to our release management, incident management, change management, problem management, and knowledge management functions that ensure our creators can create and players can play.

This position is eligible for remote work 

What you bring to the table 

The video game industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners. Therefore, this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities: 

• Building positive and collaborative relationships across the company
• Proposing process improvements and automation to support our release, incident, and problem management goals
• Leading release, deployment, or related conference calls both during and outside of normal working hours
• Participating in both pre and post launch activities to ensure improvements to the overall Blizzard Release processes
• Partnering with inter-departmental workgroups and v-teams to solve challenges related to Releases
• Data-first approach in measuring success: utilize reporting and analytics, tracking and monitoring of improvements against key performance metrics
• Playing major role in investigations for root cause of on-going and past, most impactful incidents affecting releases and generally
• Driving rapid recovery and resolution of widespread incidents, in an on-call role both during and outside of normal working hours

You may succeed in this role if you...

• Love to solve novel and exciting problems
• Find joy in connecting the right people to tackle challenging issues
• Have the habit of being first to break the ice
• Are inspired to make everyone's job easier by improving process
• Strive to be better, smarter, and faster tomorrow than you are today
• Enjoy trying new technologies and trends to improve what we're doing today

Types of projects you may work on...

• Launching new titles, seasons, and special events for Blizzard titles and Battle.net platform titles
• Helping deliver successful BlizzCon, Game tradeshows, and similar live events
• Evaluation and tuning of existing processes
• Sponsoring creation of new (or enhancing existing) tools supporting processes owned by the Operations Center
• Collaborating with service owners to find opportunities to reduce interrupt work and negative player experience caused by incidents

Player Profile 
 Minimum Requirements 

• Release Managers are expected to be intensely curious and tenacious in pursuit of answers.
• Release Managers at Blizzard should embrace the spotlight as they will be responsible for coordination and collaboration on the highest visibility projects.
• Release Managers at Blizzard are expected to have an aptitude for picking up new technologies and procedures that are used across the enterprise. Here's a non-exhaustive list of technologies Release Managers may be exposed to:
  • Service Operations Framework/Workflows (ITIL, Incident/Problem/Event/Change