Role Purpose:
The Manager, Digital Release & Configuration Management is responsible for governing the end-to-end release lifecycle, hotfix deployment process, and configuration management discipline across Saudia's digital platforms. The role ensures all changes — whether standard releases, emergency hotfixes, CUG (Closed User Group) deployments, or changes initiated by external entities affecting digital environments — are risk-assessed, safe, controlled, and fully traceable. Configuration management scope spans all platform configurations including Sitecore CMS, Amadeus PSS, Comarch CRM, Azure cloud services, Confluent Kafka, and all other systems within the digital ecosystem, ensuring consistency, stability, and controlled evolution of digital services.
The role's responsibilities are organized across four key leadership pillars:
- Release Governance, Hotfix & Emergency Change Control:
- CI/CD Pipeline Governance & Environment Control
- Configuration Management & CMDB Integrity
- Operational Readiness & CUG Deployment Oversight
Key Responsibilities:
Release Governance, Change Control & Emergency Hotfix Management
- Own and chair the Change Advisory Board (CAB), acting as the decision authority for all production changes, ensuring all standard, normal, and emergency changes are risk-assessed, approved, and co , aligning release windows across digital product teams, infrastructure, and vendors to manage conflicts and minimize operational risk.
- Define and enforce enterprise change policies, risk models, and approval workflows aligned to ITIL best practices and Saudia's operational risk appetite ensuring consistent governance across all change types.
- Own the emergency hotfix model, enabling a controlled fast-track process for P1 and critical P2 incident fixes that supports rapid recovery while preserving change traceability, accountability, or post-implementation review.
- Act as the single control gate for all production changes, ensuring no internal or external change is deployed without formal governance and approval through this function.
- Lead post-implementation reviews for high-risk and failed changes, driving root-cause analysis and corrective actions implementing corrective actions to reduce recurrence.
- Support governance audits by providing CAB traceability and release evidence and implementing corrective actions to address identified gaps.
CI/CD Pipeline Governance & Lower Environment Control
- Define and enforce enterprise CI/CD pipeline standards across all digital product teams, defining quality gates, test coverage requirements, environment promotion criteria, and deployment approval workflows, ensuring consistent and controlled delivery practices.
- Own and enforce lower environment control, governing the promotion of code and configuration changes through development, integration testing, and staging environments.
- Define and enforce branching strategies, code freeze periods, and release branching standards to minimize integration risk and enable stable, production-ready releases.
- Own rollback and feature flag governance, ensuring all deployments have validated rollback procedures, and controlled feature activation mechanisms.
- Track deployment frequency, lead time for change, and change failure rate as core DORA metrics to monitor delivery performance and drive continuous improvement across release pipelines.
Configuration Management & CMDB Integrity
- Own and govern the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), ensuring all configuration items — infrastructure, applications, integrations, databases, and middleware — are accurately recorded, maintained, and retired.
- Define and govern the full scope of platform configuration management, explicitly covering: Sitecore CMS configurations (environment-specific settings, publishing service configs, content delivery and management node configs, Sitecore CDP and personalization rule configurations); Amadeus PSS configuration sets and NDC parameter management; Comarch CRM campaign, loyalty, and API configuration; Azure platform configurations including App Service settings, API Management policies, AKS config maps, pipeline variables, and Key Vault entries; Confluent Kafka topic configurations, consumer group settings, and schema registry entries; ensuring full visibility and control over configurations that define service behavior.
- Lead periodic CMDB audits and reconciliation exercises, coordinating with Infrastructure Operations, Platform Engineering, and application teams, ensuring data accuracy, completeness, and alignment with live environments.
- Govern configuration drift detection and remediation, ensuring production environments remain aligned to approved configuration baselines, preventing unauthorized or unintended deviations from approved states.
- Ensure the CMDB supports change impact assessment, incident root-cause analysis, and regulatory audit requests.
Operational Readiness & CUG Deployment Oversight
- Define and enforce operational readiness checklists for all new digital capabilities entering production, covering monitoring coverage, alerting thresholds, runbook readiness, rollback plans, and stakeholder notification, ensuring no release proceeds without meeting defined production readiness criteria.
- Oversee and govern Closed User Group (CUG) deployments ensuring CUG scope, entry/exit criteria, monitoring, and escalation paths are formally defined.
- Lead pre-release walkthroughs with Digital Service Monitoring, Digital Testing, and Platform Engineering to validate production readiness.
- Maintain a release risk register, tracking high-risk deployments, dependency conflicts, and open operational concerns ahead of each release window, providing visibility of release risks and enabling informed go/no-go decisions.
- Lead release governance for significant vendor platform upgrades including Amadeus Nevio PSS updates, Comarch CRM releases, Sitecore upgrades, and Azure infrastructure changes.
- Ensure all production deployments are accompanied by communication plans, stakeholder notifications, and hypercare plans.
Reporting, Governance & Continuous Improvement
- Produce weekly and monthly release and configuration performance reports covering change volumes, deployment success rates, CMDB health, hotfix frequency, CUG outcomes, and CAB governance metrics.
- Chair the monthly Release Governance Forum, bringing together delivery leads, infrastructure, testing, and monitoring stakeholders, ensuring alignment on release priorities, risk posture, and cross-domain dependencies.
- Lead trend analysis on change-induced incidents, identifying systemic patterns and driving structural improvements.
- Drive continuous improvement of release tooling, automation coverage, and configuration management practices.
- Maintain and enhance the change management policy, CAB terms of reference, and CMDB governance framework as the digital platform landscape evolves.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Experience:
- Minimum 7+ years of experience in release management, change management, DevOps, or IT service management.
- At least 3+ years in a management or team leadership role with accountability for release or configuration management functions.
- Demonstrated experience governing release pipelines and change processes in complex, multi-vendor digital environments.
Preferred Certifications:
- ITIL v4 Foundation required; ITIL Managing Professional (Create, Deliver and Support module) strongly preferred.
- SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE) or SAFe Practitioner — advantageous.
- ServiceNow Certified System Administrator or CMDB / ITSM Implementation Specialist.
- Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) — strongly preferred.
- PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner.
- Sitecore certification (Developer or Administrator level) — advantageous.
- Experience in airline, aviation, or travel technology environments is a strong differentiator.
