Release Lead

About the role

PACT Employment is hiring a Release Lead in Dubai on a contractor basis. The role defines and maintains the release policy, master release plan and end-to-end release gate process for all CDP applications, and drives CI/CD and DevOps adoption across development, testing, staging and production.

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain the Release Policy, Master Release Plan and release gate process for all CDP applications.
• Own the Master Release Calendar and coordinate release schedules across projects to avoid conflicts.
• Work with the Change Management team so that applications complete release governance and readiness checks before CAB approval.
• Drive CI/CD and DevOps adoption, including automated deployments and improved automated release practices using DevOps, BDD, containerized deployment and CI/CD tools.
• Collaborate with Development, QA, DevOps, Infrastructure, Security and Change teams on repeatable release execution.
• Define readiness criteria, entry/exit gates, deployment checklists, rollback plans and post-release validation.
• Manage release dependencies across applications, platforms, integrations and SaaS solutions.
• Use JIRA to track release activities, dependencies, risks, issues and readiness.
• Set up monitoring and release dashboards, define KPIs (release success rate, deployment frequency, rollback rate, lead time, incidents) and report regularly to CDP leadership.
• Continuously improve release automation, standardization, quality and time-to-market.

Required profile

• Proven experience as a Release Lead / Release Manager in large-scale enterprise technology environments.
• Experience managing releases across multiple applications, environments, integrations and technology terms.
• Strong stakeholder management skills and ability to coordinate multiple technology teams and concurrent projects.
• Analytical and problem-solving skills focused on automation, operational efficiency and continuous improvement.

Required skills

• CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, automated deployments, containerization and BDD.
• JIRA and release/change management processes.
• Monitoring, deployment and DevOps toolsets.
• Enterprise change governance, CAB processes, release controls and production deployment practices.