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Lead Release Manager

Job details
Posting date: 10 July 2025
Salary: £60,300 to £70,730 per year
Additional salary information: New entrants to the Civil Service will start their role on the salary band minimum: £60,300 for National Roles. £64,300 for London Roles.
Hours: Full time
Closing date: 24 July 2025
Location: Croydon
Company: Government Recruitment Service
Job type: Permanent
Job reference: 415932/1

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Summary

This role involves leading the management of IT-related service changes within the Home Office. It requires navigating a complex environment of technologies, third-party suppliers, and both internal and cross-government teams to deliver a critical service within Digital Data and Technology (DDaT).

Making informed and sometimes difficult decisions will be essential, based on gathered insights and effective risk assessment. By applying established processes, methods, tools, and applications, you’ll help ensure the highest levels of availability and performance across technology services.

As the strategic lead for the Operational Release Management team, you’ll define priorities and areas of focus. Ensuring that processes are clearly documented and aligned with best practices will be a key part of your responsibilities. You’ll also develop templates and frameworks to support process variations across services and portfolios.

The successful candidate will either be located in Croydon - 2 Ruskin Square, Hendon - Data Centre, Manchester - Soapworks, or Sheffield - Vulcan House. Under Home Office hybrid working practices there is an expectation that you will attend the office for a minimum of 60% of your working hours. 

Due to the nature of the role, this post is available on a full-time basis only.

About the job

The Release Manager role sits within the Migration and Borders Technology Portfolio and provides SME capabilities that support Critical National Infrastructure. This role enables and supports mission critical project and programme delivery as well as supporting the end to end lifecycles of our products throughout their iterations. It is crucial to ensure the ongoing performance and stability of our products and Release Management will act as the gatekeeper to the live environment. This role protects and safeguards live service of these products whilst vital improvement and upgrades are applied.

As a Lead Release Manager your main day to day responsibilities will be:

  • Leading the team to oversee the process of release, allocating workload, and acting as the highest escalation point if there are any issues.
  • Providing specialist advice and overseeing the approval, prioritisation, and refusal of major Release Requests, ensuring that authorised releases maintain the integrity of the IT architecture and fall within budget and resource constraints. Out-of-hours working will be required as necessary to oversee defined releases.
  • Additionally, reporting to senior IT Operations and wider management, while representing this function across various boards and governance platforms.
  • Overseeing teams to ensure that services are delivered by the team and suppliers within defined timescales and are well documented.
  • Developing policies, processes, and procedures aligned with best practices to ensure the delivery of quality services. Exploring opportunities to automate and draw on efficiencies from other Service Management areas where possible. Continually enhancing service improvements through the measurement and challenge of services and processes.
  • An employee may be required to carry out other duties within the scope of the grade and within the limits of their skill, competence, and training and provide the best possible service and deliver work in a timely and efficient manner.

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Disability Confident
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident.

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