Release Train Engineer: Payments at Vodafone Global Enterprise

Role purpose:

• The Release Train Engineer is responsible for the planning, coordination, and deployment of all releases into production within a particular domain or business outcome
• This role is responsible for identifying, managing, and mitigating cross-program risks and issues, in order to facilitate on-time delivery of capabilities and features aligned to the business outcome vision
• This role is responsible for working closely with the domain or business outcome Product Manager and supporting Product Owners to coordinate delivery of capabilities
• This role is responsible for defining release readiness requirements against business outcome needs and validating readiness before release into production

Your responsibilities will include:

Execute Agile Release Train based on agreed PI objectives

• Drive multiple release planning sessions
• Facilitate the resolution of impediments and risks within span of influence. Once an impediment is outside of a Scrum Master’s span of influence this role will step in to remove or escalate the impediment
• Work with other program leaders to drive the definition and refinement of the program backlog and execution alignment.
• Maintain metrics that provide visibility to stakeholders on program-level plans, progress and quality.
• Support Product Owners with various requirements gathering and scrum activities as needed
• Help to assure value delivery
• Aggregate team objectives into programme objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency
• Assist with execution and feature/capability completion tracking (KPIs/metrics)
• Facilitate periodic synchronization meetings (Scrum of Scrums and PO Sync)
• Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and roll-up to the value stream level and portfolio level
• Drive relentless improvement 
• Manage program planning of engineering delivery
• Monitor and facilitate programs
• Manage the deployment of all releases into production and define / assess release readiness according to business requirements
• Coordinate and communicate the release pipeline to deliver frequent releases across business outcomes; manage external dependencies, ensuring alignment across key partners and vendors
• Continuously improve release processes, implementing best practices consistent with agile methodologies

Tech Lead/DevOps Contributor

• Oversee squads focused on technical issues, including software development, product releases, and engineering tasks. This includes collaborating with colleagues to address technical issues and evaluating the team's work processes and best practices and implementing changes to streamline operations. 
• Create and implement risk mitigation processes and oversee security audits to determine weaknesses in applications.
• Coordinating the efforts of product development teams with that of operations teams across the ART. This includes heavy involvement in both the worlds of development and operations. 
• Play a key role in the development of new ideas for products and services and manage the process of turning these ideas into realities. This could include participating in product brainstorming meetings, overseeing the creation of product mock-ups, and identifying possible design flaws until the resulting product is satisfactory. 
• Work to set up the process by which the product will be produced on a larger scale and figure out how it will be distributed to consumers.

Solution Design Contributor

• Play an important role in the development cycle, ensuring the quality of requirements and directing the activities of the design team. This role requires excellent attention to detail, as the RTE frequently needs to work with the solution analysist and participate in translating them into a solutions that align with enterprise-level systems.
• In addition to guiding the squads, this role is responsible for participating in the research on existing systems and devising solutions that work within those systems.

The RTE is ultimately responsible for the Release Train and has to ensure the quality of :

• Functional Requirements
• Develop Specifications
• ART Scope
• Lead The squads : internal and external 
• Interface Directly Business Stakeholders
• Manage sourcing relationships and external vendors

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

Must have technical / professional qualifications: 

• At least a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or other related field 
• Eight or more years’ experience in coordinating and delivering major projects and programs 
• Extensive experience in managing dependencies effectively across multiple delivery teams, meeting deadlines and business outcome objectives
• Experience managing multiple vendors, and managing delivery with the vendors
• Formal training and/or certification in Scaled Agile Framework or similar preferred
• Certified Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM) or similar
• Extensive experience with one or more project/program management methodologies, such as PMI PMBOK, PRINCE2, Agile and MSP and across a range of project types
• Experience with project management tools e.g. JIRA, MS Project
• Professional experience and knowledge of Payments industries (POS; Ecommerce; Mcommerce) strongly preferred
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunications industries strongly preferred

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

• Release train / pipeline planning, coordination, facilitation, and management
• Automated release and configuration management
• Program Increment (PI) Planning
• Production-readiness criteria definition and assessment of modules and supporting systems
• Systems thinking
• Ability to operate independently and escalate where necessary
• Agile software development environment and methods
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery methodologies and tools
• DevOps culture, processes, and tools
• Vendor selection and RFP / RFI management
• Contract definition and negotiation
• Vendor performance, contract, and relationship management
• Expertise with project planning tools e.g. Microsoft Project and Project Server, JIRA
• Multi-sourcing approaches
• People management including performance discussions and performance processes. 
• Stakeholder management (internal and external) including effective stakeholder communication and management. 
• Strong business acumen, including with an in-depth understanding of the contribution of the domain or business outcome to the wider digital business strategy and roadmap
• Excellent collaboration skills, with the ability to work in a fast-paced team environment, influencing, empowering, and coaching teams to agile teams to self-organize, self-manage and self-improve
• Ability to contextualise the wider business and financial goals to the domain and make decisions, prioritization, and recommendations accordingly 

We make an impact by offering:

• Enticing incentive programs, competitive benefit packages, and an exclusive 13th cheque
• Retirement funds, risk benefits, and medical aid benefits
• Cell phone and data benefits, advantages fibre connection discounts, and exclusive staff discounts offered in collaboration with partner companies