Release Manager

At VIDA, we’re passionate about driving positive change in lung and respiratory care through thoughtful, innovative technology. We’re committed to reshaping the way organizations and physicians approach pulmonary medicine with powerful artificial intelligence and image analysis. Our talented team works hard every day to design cutting-edge solutions that truly improve patients’ lives around the world. We’re a small, fast-growing company with big benefits and the kind of culture that makes you smile. All we’re missing is YOU! If you’re looking to make a difference and channel your expertise into meaningful work that’s changing the world for the better, we want to hear from you.

Role Overview

VIDA is seeking a technical, systems-oriented Release Manager to lead and continuously improve how software changes move safely and efficiently from development into production across VIDA’s cloud-based products and services.

This role goes beyond scheduling releases or manually coordinating deployments. You own and improve the release operating model—the processes, automation, controls, telemetry, and cross-functional practices that enable engineering teams to release independently while protecting product quality, customer data, production reliability, security, and VIDA’s regulatory and compliance obligations.

Operating within a healthcare and life-sciences SaaS environment, this role partners closely with Engineering, Architecture, Cloud Operations, Product Management, Data Science, Quality, Security, and Compliance to establish a modern, risk-based software delivery model.

You will also be VIDA's voice on AI-enabled software delivery process, making sure the added velocity from AI-assisted engineering is supported by effective testing, review, traceability, security controls, observability, and production safeguards.

Key Responsibilities

Release Strategy and Delivery Governance

• Define and continuously improve VIDA’s software release strategy, standards, governance model, and success measures.
• Evolve VIDA toward a continuous, automated, and risk-based delivery model that minimizes unnecessary manual coordination and approvals.
• Establish release classifications based on clinical and customer impact, data sensitivity, reversibility, and blast radius.
• Define proportionate controls for each level of release risk, including when changes can proceed automatically and when additional testing, review, progressive delivery, or approval is required.
• Establish practical emergency-change and exception processes that preserve accountability and traceability without slowing critical remediation.
• Use production incidents, near misses, audit findings, and delivery friction to drive continuous improvement.

CI/CD, Progressive Delivery, and Production Safety

• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, and Cloud Operations on paved-road CI/CD — trunk-based development, small batch sizes, reusable workflows, and standard deployment patterns.
• Agile processes that infuse automated quality, security, compliance, and operational checks into the software delivery lifecycle.
• Ensure release evidence—including source traceability, peer review, testing, security validation, deployment history, approvals, and post-release results—is reliable, searchable, and audit-ready.
• Align the release model to support decoupling of deployment from release using feature flags, canary and staged rollouts, and blue/green deployments, so teams ship continuously while customer exposure stays under separate control.
• Establish measurable release-health criteria and effective pause, rollback, forward-fix, and feature-disablement practices.
• Work with engineering teams to ensure critical services have clear operational ownership, observability, rollback strategies, and incident-response paths.
• Strengthen software supply-chain controls — dependency and secrets management, artifact integrity, SBOMs, and infrastructure-as-code validation.

AI-Assisted Software Engineering

• Help define and operationalize VIDA’s standards and guardrails for responsible AI-assisted software development.
• Ensure AI-assisted and AI-generated code remains subject to appropriate human ownership, peer review, testing, security validation, architecture standards, traceability, and production-readiness requirements through established processes.
• Partner with Security, Privacy, Quality, and Compliance to establish processes that protect source code, credentials, PHI, PII, customer information, and other sensitive data when AI development tools are used.
• Measure the impact of AI-assisted engineering on development velocity, quality, security findings, change failure rates, rollback frequency, and production incidents.
• Help VIDA increase engineering productivity through AI without weakening quality, security, regulatory compliance, or accountability.

Delivery Performance and Continuous Improvement

• Establish a balanced software-delivery scorecard covering velocity, quality, reliability, security, compliance, and customer impact.
• Track and improve the four DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery time — alongside rollback rate, escaped defects, and pipeline reliability.
• Use delivery data to identify systemic constraints including unreliable tests, slow environments, excessive manual steps, ineffective approvals, and recurring sources of production failures.
• Provide engineering and executive leadership with clear visibility into software delivery health, release risk, AI-development adoption, and improvement opportunities.
• Lead improvement initiatives that reduce release friction while increasing engineering autonomy and production reliability.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Engineering leaders and technical leads to establish clear service ownership and accountability for production changes.
• Work with Product Management on feature rollout, customer communication, staged availability, and release readiness.
• Collaborate with Quality Engineering to strengthen automated testing, risk-based validation, and quality signals.
• Ensure software-delivery practices meet VIDA policies, customer obligations, and applicable regulatory requirements.
• Support customer assessments and audits by maintaining defensible release and change-management evidence.
• Run the release capability as a platform product — treat engineering teams as your customers, measure adoption, and never become a centralized release bottleneck.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, release engineering, SRE, platform engineering, quality engineering, or a related technical delivery discipline.
• 2+ years leading or materially improving release management, CI/CD, DevOps, or production-readiness practices in a SaaS or cloud environment.
• Strong understanding of processes behind CI/CD, Test Driven Development, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with progressive delivery approaches including feature flags, staged rollouts, canary or blue/green deployment, health-based promotion, and rollback.
• Strong understanding of software delivery metrics, observability, incident response, and operational reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to design risk-based processes that improve engineering velocity while maintaining production safety.
• Strong systems thinking and organizational-change experience leveraging Agile delivery methodologies such as ScrumBan, Kanban, SAFe, etc.
• Ability to engage credibly with engineers on technical details that impact process, releases, and messaging to internal/external stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, medical software, clinical trials, or another regulated SaaS environment.
• Familiarity with frameworks or requirements such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP/GCP, NIST, or OWASP.
• Experience with AWS, containerized or serverless systems, infrastructure as code, and modern DevOps tooling.
• Experience building reusable CI/CD workflows, internal developer platforms, policy-as-code controls, or developer self-service capabilities.
• Familiarity with software supply-chain security, vulnerability management, SBOMs, artifact integrity, and secrets management.
• Experience using or governing AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, or similar technologies.
• Experience supporting enterprise customer security assessments, compliance reviews, or external audits.

Reporting Relationship

This role reports to the VP of Engineering and works closely with Engineering, Architecture, Cloud Operations, Product Management, Data Science, Software Quality, Security, Privacy, Compliance, Customer Success, and Technical Support.

Engineering teams and service owners retain accountability for the quality and operation of their services. The Release Manager provides the strategy, processes, standards, visibility, and oversight that enable those teams to deliver software safely and efficiently.

All VIDA employees expected to be flexible and have an entrepreneurial mindset. Other duties may be assigned as needed.

VIDA is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran’s status, age or disability.