Lead Release Engineer

Management Level

Equiniti provides expert shareholder, pension and remediation services to help our customers succeed with three divisions supporting our clients:

• Shareholder Services where 90 billion in payments are sent annually to shareholders
• Retirement Solutions where annually 15.1 billion in payments to pensioners and annuitants are made
• Customer Resolutions, four combined services delivering customer resolutions such as regulatory change and remediation projects

Equiniti is a values-led business. Day-to-day, the choices we make are guided by our values of being Trusted, Collaborative, Commercial and always seeking to Improve. We employ c.5000 people across 26 locations worldwide delivering innovative solutions to a wide range of clients.

Division Business Function

EQRS and CPD Testing Release management

Role Summary

The role of a Lease Release Engineer is an enabling test role withing CPD and is to provide release management services across CPD project delivery teams. Working alongside Project Test Managers to ensure core functional deliveries from Product Engineering (PE) and configuration layers from Professional Services (PS) are released in a controlled and timely manner. Possessing strong communication skills to be a point of contact for all release activities, across the Core Product, Configuration layers and the Client Delivery activities, be confident to communicate at a senior project level. Day-to-day activities will focus on analysing release notes provided from PE (core) or PS (config) to assess the code coverage within a release, and its application touch points. Working with the Test Manager / Lead Release Engineer to understand risks to enact a code release, ensuring no impact on inflight testing, whilst rejecting if entry criteria to commence a release hasn t been achieved.

Core Duties/Responsibilities

The successful candidate will be responsible for the following:

• Working with Project Managers, Test Managers, Lead Release Engineer to agree timeframes for release of new / amended code to System Test, BAT (Business Acceptance Test), Pre-Production (User Acceptance Testing) and ultimately into live environments for project planning purposes
• Lead, guide and monitor the release processes, including the implementation of new release procedures
• Mentor and support for Release Engineer(s), regular 1-2-1 s and perform periodic performance reviews
• Analysing release notes from PE and PS to determine the level of testing needed from the CPD test teams, noting risks if timescales are too tight to do a thorough test cycle
• As a Lead Release Engineer you will be responsible for scheduling, planning and progressing of a release across the various environment stage gates, as per the STLC and Release Management Lifecycle protocols
• Coordinating across the various teams, in PE, PS and CPD Testing to ensure the right level of status reporting is provided for project and test management
• Guiding and the setting up new environments in co-ordination with junior release engineers and technical services
• Fully understand how all aspects of your work integrates with the rest of the SDLC and the CPD STLC
• Change control - monitor changes to an original release (build or patch) for impact analysis and capture these changes within a traceability matrix or within ADO/Jira
• Working with test CPD testing team, support defect resolution, fast-tracking fixes through to production, whilst ensuring Release Management stage gates for deployments are followed
• Utilise the standard deployment tools, as prescribed within the Release Management protocols, templates used and the Test Policy adhered to for both applications, Compendia and Administrator
• Ensure successful delivery and conclusion of all release management activities to meet the project target date, as captured in the release calendars

Skills, Qualifications and Knowledge

The successful candidate will demonstrate the following experience, skills, behaviours and able to fulfil the role:

• Be ISEB foundation qualified is desirable in either IT Assets Infrastructure or Software Testing (ISTQB - foundation)
• Experience of working within the financial sector would be advantageous
• A basic understanding of UK Pension schemes or the UK financial sector and its complexities is desirable, to be able to perform risk assessments
• Have demonstrable experience of reviewing, validating and updating release management documentation so they can become client facing papers
• Experience of working in fault review sessions, coordinating with the testers for defect resolution
• Have experience of working with the UAT/BAT teams to support final delivery to our clients
• Must be technical competent to perform release engineering activities, such as:
  • SQL scripting experience,
  • An understanding of DevOps tools like Docker, GIT or ADO,
  • Basic knowledge of configuration management and version controls,
  • Experience of working on software deployment tools, to achiever a stable environment for testing and operation activities to commence,
  • Experience to cooperate with Developers and Configuration Analysts where there has been release failures
  • An understanding of Application packaging and deployment, along with the complexities of supporting Infrastructure including Cloud Services (ideally experience of AWS)

We are committed to equality of opportunity for all staff and applications from individuals are encouraged regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships. Please note any offer of employment is subject to satisfactory pre-employment screening checks.