Costco Wholesale
Website:
costco.com
Job details:
About Costco Wholesale:
Costco Wholesale is a multi-billion-dollar global retailer with warehouse club operations in eleven countries. They provide a wide selection of quality merchandise, plus the convenience of specialty departments and exclusive member services, all designed to make shopping a pleasurable experience for their members.
About Costco Wholesale India:
At Costco Wholesale India, we foster a collaborative space, working to support Costco Wholesale in developing innovative solutions that improve members’ experiences and make employees’ jobs easier. Our employees play a key role in driving and delivering innovation to establish IT as a core competitive advantage for Costco Wholesale.
Position: Release Manager - SAP Platform
Position Summary:
Release Managers are responsible for the release lifecycle. This includes the planning, scheduling, coordinating, and overall management of the software build process through the different stages within Costco's delivery lifecycle. Release Managers are responsible for creating detailed integrated release plans across several products and dependencies, for improving the software build process, and for optimizing the release pipeline. Release Managers build and maintain relationships with stakeholders, team members, and peers and are responsible for communicating release expectations and statuses across value streams, program stakeholders, and impacted users.
The SAP Platform Release Manager manages and orchestrates the cross-organizational efforts required to introduce applications, infrastructure, and middleware changes into both the non-production and production environments. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for ensuring all capabilities required to package changes for delivery to users are in place, while maintaining the integrity and availability of the existing system. The SAP Platform Release Manager is responsible for setting and communicating release expectations across all involved teams and impacted users.
Job Duties/Essential Functions:
- Manages, organizes, and directs work for building and maintaining software, and infrastructure releases for their promotion through a series of non-production SAP landscapes, and leading to a production environment deployment.
- Manages, organizes, and directs releases that comprise of cross-functional teams, and a multitude of interrelated and independent application and/or infrastructure changes.
- Manages and drives deployment risk mitigation practices (i.e., back out/contingency planning) for the duration of the release cycle to ensure an organized and successful deployment.
- Develops and stewards the Release Management process, along with establishing specific standards to govern the process.
- Creates deployment plans in smart sheets, and ensures dependencies are identified and managed accordingly.
- Coordinates/consumes production releases, support packs, retro-fits, and changes from all projects within the program landscape.
- Ensures strategies are developed for effectively managing change across the solution landscape and platform.
- Establishes and communicates release expectations, milestones, and release activity progress across all involved teams.
- Provides reports for and across all involved teams.
- Develops and maintains a release management discipline based on experience, best practices, and proven methodologies.
- Facilitates planning and documentation of rollback strategies, hypercare support, and handoff to production support teams.
- Facilitates the execution of mock and production cutovers.
- Conducts release readiness reviews, kick-offs, deployment planning meetings, and Go/No-Go meetings.
- Creates and owns a lessons learned document and drives change to continually improve the release process.
- Assures appropriate change management processes are followed for all required technical changes (e.g., patching, OSS notes) and have been applied to all appropriate environments.
- Coordinates with various teams to manage release scheduling for all in scope applications and maintains the master release schedule. Proactively plans system patching and application upgrades/enhancements to minimize release impact and risk.
- Communicates and coordinates with all stakeholders to ensure the required training and/or communication is provided to the affected user community (Service Desk, OCM, Business, IT).
- Documents to ensure that approved entrance/exit criteria artifacts required for production deployment are in place.
- Documents pre and post-deployment issue resolution within defined SLAs.
- Identifies and resolves problems often anticipating issues before they occur or before they grow; develops and evaluates options and implements solutions.
- Partners with Project Manager(s) on development release strategy and deployment plans.
- Regular and reliable workplace attendance at your assigned location.
Ability to operate vehicles, equipment or machinery:
- Computer, phone, printer, copier, fax
Non-Essential Functions:
- Assists in other areas of the department as necessary.
- Assists in other areas of the company as necessary.
Ability to operate vehicles, equipment or machinery:
- Same as essential functions
Experience, Skills, Education & Licenses/Certifications:
Required:
- Master’s or Engineering Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent technical field) as explicitly required to understand complex SAP software architectures, technical dependencies, and integration environments.
- 5+ Years of Dedicated Software Release Management: Proven experience planning, scheduling, orchestrating, and executing enterprise software builds and cutovers across complex, multi-tiered non-production and production landscapes.
- Hands-on Cutover & Deployment Execution: Proven track record of leading mock cutovers, live production cutovers, hypercare support, and Go/No-Go readiness reviews.
- Risk Mitigation & Incident Management: Hands-on experience developing rollback/contingency strategies, enforcing entrance/exit criteria, and leading rapid pre- and post-deployment issue resolutions within defined SLAs.
- Direct SAP Project Lifecycle Experience: Deep understanding of SAP-specific deployment practices, including SAP Transport Management System (TMS), ChaRM, dual-landscape maintenance (retrofit processes), system patching, and OSS Notes application.
- SAP Finance Domain Familiarity: Working familiarity with SAP Finance modules to evaluate release risks, business impacts, and cutover sequencing specifically tailored to financial period-ends and high-availability retail financial operations.
- Off-Hours Operational Ownership: Willingness and capability to operate effectively in a 24x7x365 environment, taking ownership during evening, weekend, and holiday maintenance/deployment windows.
- Release Tooling & Collaboration: Proficiency in Smartsheet for dependency tracking and master cutover plan creation, along with Google Workspace (Sheets, Docs, Slides) for executive status reporting and stakeholder alignment.
- Change Governance & Compliance: Practical experience enforcing formal change control standards across cross-functional delivery teams, infrastructure engineers, third-party vendors, and IT Service Desk.
- Excellent interpersonal and diplomatic skills as well as a positive attitude.
- Strong communication skills, both verbal and written.
- Excellent organizational and planning skills, with experience building deployment/cutover plans.
- Experience in negotiating timelines and deliverables with a strong sense of urgency.
- Strong process knowledge of System Development Life Cycles.
- Flexible, must be able to change priorities quickly, focus on new ones without distraction, be able to deal with conflict and work under pressure to meet deliverable dates/timelines.
- 24x7x365 operations - evening, weekend, and holiday work may be required.
Recommended:
- Hands on SAP Platforms or Finance experience is desirable.
- Formal SAP Training & Certifications (Recommended): Functional or technical certifications in SAP Platform / S/4HANA or SAP Finance (FI/CO) to provide the technical authority needed to review changes independently without relying heavily on developers for basic technical validation.
- Project & IT Governance Certifications (Bonus): PMP (Project Management Professional) or ITIL Certification to effectively establish release governance, rollback frameworks, entrance/exit criteria, and structure
- Change Advisory Board (CAB) alignment.
- Smartsheet knowledge.
- Proficient in Google Workspace applications, including Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Gmail.
- Successful internal candidates will have spent one year or more on their current team.
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