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Wordly · 21 hours ago

Engineering Operations & Release Lead

United States

Full-time

Remote

Senior Level

5+ years exp

Wordly is a fast-growing tech startup focused on high-quality, real-time translation services. The Engineering Operations & Release Lead will own the operational flow for feature releases, ensuring they are predictable, low-risk, and compliant while collaborating with Product and Engineering leadership.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Event ManagementGovTechMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaSSoftwareSpeech RecognitionTranslation Service

Responsibilities

Own and continuously improve Wordly’s release and change management process so that releases are predictable, auditable, and aligned with our SDLC and compliance expectations

Maintain the release calendar and work with Product Managers and Engineering Managers to align releases with priorities, target dates, and customer commitments

Participate in and, when appropriate, help facilitate planning and retrospectives with a focus on flow, release readiness, dependencies, and cross-team coordination

Ensure pre- and post-deployment smoke tests are defined and executed for each application, coordinating with QA and feature owners; where needed, perform minimal smoke checks on critical flows

Partner with Systems (DevOps and QA) on CI/CD and deployment improvements, and on test strategy as it relates to releases, while respecting their ownership of tooling and detailed test design

Ensure releases have the necessary change records, approvals, and test evidence to support SOC 2 and ISO 27001 expectations. Maintain clear documentation and runbooks for the release process

Communicate release scope, status, and risks clearly to stakeholders. Make sure post-deployment checks are completed and feed learnings from incidents and failed releases back into the process

Track and report on key release and delivery metrics and use them to propose and drive concrete improvements to our SDLC, release cadence, and engineering operations

Qualification

Engineering OperationsRelease ManagementCI/CD ToolingCloud-native ArchitecturesChange ManagementDelivery MetricsInfrastructure-as-CodeCommunication

Required

5+ years in Engineering Operations, Release Management, DevOps, SRE, or a closely related operational role in a cloud-native software environment

Proven experience coordinating releases across multiple teams or services, including planning, communication, and post-release follow-up

Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD) and comfortable inspecting and managing build and deployment workflows

Solid understanding of SDLC, environments, branching strategies, and standard quality gates (reviews, testing, smoke tests)

Experience working with structured change management (change records, approvals, release checklists) suitable for audit and compliance

Working knowledge of cloud-native architectures (containers, microservices, Kubernetes or similar) and their impact on deployment and release risk

Strong communication skills and ability to explain risks, timelines, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Comfortable working in a remote-first, globally distributed team

Preferred

Experience operating releases for an enterprise SaaS product with security/compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001)

Familiarity with delivery metrics (e.g., deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate) and using them for continuous improvement

Experience refining CI/CD workflows (e.g., pipeline-as-code, release tagging/versioning strategies)

Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Helm, Ansible) sufficient to collaborate with DevOps/Systems

Experience with real-time or low-latency systems (audio/video, messaging, event-driven)

Experience facilitating or co-facilitating planning sessions, Kanban replenishment, or retrospectives

Experience working with automated dependency and vulnerability management (e.g., Dependabot, GitHub security alerts, or similar tools)

Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) and their impact on developer productivity and code quality