Senior Manager - Release Engineering

We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.

Position Summary:

CVS Health is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to oversee Release Engineering for the Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness. Release Engineering owns the safety, consistency, and recoverability of application, platform, infrastructure, and edge changes across CVS Health's pharmacy, retail, and digital technology ecosystem (~9,000 stores, centralized platforms, and edge/dispensing systems).

 

The team defines and enforces the standards, guardrails, gates, and validation logic into pipelines that ride on top of our existing CI/CD and DevX investments, and drives their consistent adoption. Success looks like every engineering team shipping through the same trusted, instrumented release path.

 

Release Engineering partners with SRE, Dev/Engineering, Infrastructure, and Change Management so that every production change is observable, validated, and reversible before it ships, and executes against reliability standards: Production Readiness Reviews (PRR), operational readiness requirements, SLO-based deployment policies, and incident-learning outcomes.

 

Primary Objectives:

Change Failure Reduction 

• Own Change Failure Rate (CFR) as the primary success metric
• Reduce deployment-induced incidents through deployment automation, validation, and recovery engineering 
• Maintain release-to-incident correlation to support postmortems and problem management

 

Deployment Guardrail & Governance Engineering 

• Define, enhance, operate CI/CD capabilities and deployment automation 
• Standardize delivery patterns across application, infrastructure, and edge platforms 
• Improve deployment reliability, consistency, and developer experience

 

Deployment Safety & Validation 

• Establish automated pre- and post-deployment validation
• Integrate synthetic testing, health checks, and observability signals into deployment workflows
• Ensure production health is verified before deployment completion

Fleet-Scale Deployment Management 

• Define and enforce ring-based deployment strategies for store, edge, and centralized platforms
• Enable progressive delivery, automated promotion gates, and controlled rollout strategies
• Minimize blast radius through phased deployment patterns

Recovery Engineering 

• Ensure every deployment has tested rollback or failback capabilities
• Improve recovery time for release-related incidents through automation
• Enable feature flags, traffic controls, and deployment safety mechanisms

 

Infrastructure Change Reliability 

• Standardize validation and rollback requirements for high-risk infrastructure changes
• Automate post-maintenance verification and health validation
• Partner with infrastructure teams to improve change reliability and reduce change-induced incidents

 

Incident & Learning Integration 

• Provide deployment and change context during major incidents
• Support release impact analysis during postmortems
• Drive deployment-related improvements from incident learnings and problem records

 

Leadership Responsibilities 

• Build and develop a high-performing Release Engineering organization
• Establish engineering-first delivery practices that prioritize reliability and safety, without adding adoption friction
• Champion automation, standardization, and continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle
• Partner with SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and Change Management to improve production reliability. This role sits at intersection and must lead through cross-org influence

 

Success Measures:

90 Days 

• Establish CFR baseline across key platforms
• Implement standardized deployment validation and rollback requirements
• Integrate PRR requirements into release workflows

 

6 Months 

• Automated deployment validation operational for priority platforms
• Ring-based deployment model implemented for selected domains
• Measurable reduction in change-related incidents

 

12 Months 

• Enterprise deployment platform standardized across major domains
• Automated deployment safety gates integrated with observability and SLO signals
• CFR and deployment recovery metrics consistently reported and improved
• Release Engineering recognized as a key enabler of reliability and operational excellence

 

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of senior software engineering leadership experience, with people management skills in high-growth or high-availability environments
• 3+ years of deep hands-on background in CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Harness), cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes, Docker)
• 3+ years of experience optimizing complex build systems and branching/merging strategies
• 3+ years of experience bridging the gap between engineering depth and business impact
• 3+ years of experience focused on automation and customer service excellence

Preferred Qualifications:

• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, including executive-level engagement, ability to lead cross-functional teams, including offshore/onshore vendor teams
• Experience implementing and improving SRE metrics in distributed environments

 

Education:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$130,295.00 - $260,590.00

This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls.  The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors.  This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above.  This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program. 
 

Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.

This full‑time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well‑being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.

Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 10/11/2026

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.