Lead Change Engineer – Nike

Bangalore, ITC

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

The Lead Change Engineer is responsible to work alongside stakeholders on overall governance, planning, coordination, and execution of software releases. This role leads the release process within an agile and collaborative environment, managing communication between cross-functional teams to ensure changes and releases are delivered successfully. This role leverages automation and modern practices like Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) to streamline the delivery pipeline, minimize risk, and accelerate the time-to-market for new features and updates.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Bachelor’s degree in Technology, Business, Engineering, or a related field; 5+ years of professional experience. 15+ years in lieu of a degree

• Demonstrable experience operating in a complex, federated global organization with ageographically dispersed team

• Experience developing risk management and contingency planning for production changes

• Successful track record of applying operational readiness techniques to complex feature implementations.

• Use of data and metrics to assess system behavior, identify bottlenecks, and propose

• Superior communication and presentation skills. Able to communicate sophisticated and technical issues effectively and concisely to leadership

• High professional standards and expectations for self and others

• A deep understanding and practical application of standard release process(s), agile methodologies, operations and technical capabilities (including agile - lean, continuous delivery, SAFE, ITIL)

• Strong relationship-building skills

• Inquisitive mindset. As deployments can be complex, strong problem-solving skills are needed to resolve conflicts and issues as they arise.

• Experience working closely with leaders and cross-functional partners to deliver key strategic initiatives

• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to motivate and influence others, negotiate during situational conflict, and establish the best forward path in the face of competing points of view

• Ability to deal with ambiguity and work in a dynamic, results-oriented matrixed environment

• A deep understanding of modern software development methodologies is crucial for defining and implementing best practices within the automated release process

• The ability to monitor, debug, and resolve issues that arise during builds and deployments is a core technical skill

•  A strong understanding of Git and branching strategies (like GitFlow) is critical for managing code merges, tagging releases, and coordinating different versions within the Jenkins pipeline

• Deep knowledge of CI/CD concepts and how to implement them within Jenkins pipeline

• Experience with applications such as JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow, Jenkins, GitHub, Splunk,IAAS, AWS engineering tools

WHAT WILL YOU WORK ON

• Helps drive, define, enhance and uphold best practices across the team for all of the below responsibilities:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to assess technical feasibility and align implementation strategies.

• Manage all change activity from planning through testing to deployment and validation

• Quality assurance and governance: Ensure that quality gates are enforced throughout the release process. Coordinate with QA teams to ensure all testing is completed successfully before deployment

• Risk and change management: Identify, document, and mitigate technical risks that could affect release scope, quality, platform/service availability, or schedule. Lead risk reviews and ensure all changes are properly reviewed and approved

• Release deployment: Facilitate and oversee all deployment activities to various environments (e.g., staging, production). Ensure that deployment procedures are well-documented and followed

• Apply structured problem-solving techniques to debug complex systems and identify root causes efficiently

• Define and publish key metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of releases as well as areas of improvement for the release management framework

• Partner closely and continually with product, program, quality, engineering, support, and release teams to align on scope, release cadence, delivery and support requirements

• Partner with the business and IT stakeholders to drive release scheduling decisions

• Provide clear, consistent, and timeline status reports to key stakeholders

• Manage go/no-go, checkpoint, and retrospective meetings with release stakeholders

• Participate in Capability Stand-ups and PI Planning sessions to determine and plan for upcoming release scope

• Post-release support: Monitor and troubleshoot production environments after a release. Coordinate with operations and development teams to resolve any issues and perform post-mortem reviews

• Identify and drive resolution of systemic issues uncovered during retrospectives, with a focus on tooling, automation, and process optimization.

• Release planning and coordination: Create and manage a release calendar, coordinate release schedules with development and product teams, and communicate release plans to all stakeholders

• Stakeholder management: In this role you will act as a central hub, communicating release plans, progress, and status updates to all teams involved, including developers, QA, operations, and business stakeholders.

• Oversee configuration management tools and ensuring proper version control of software components

• Apply expertise in writing and managing Jenkins files, often using Groovy, to define and automate the entire build, test, and deployment process

• Leverage experience with a variety of Jenkins plugins for source code management (e.g., Git), artifact management (e.g., Artifactory), and deployment to specific environments

• Drive CICD pipeline operational best practices

• CI/CD pipeline management: Oversee and improve the CI/CD pipelines, ensuring they are automated, reliable, and efficient. Implement branching strategies, feature toggles, and other release orchestration techniques

• Continuous improvement: Analyze release metrics and performance data to identify areas for improvement in the release process. Drive initiatives to increase the speed, efficiency, and reliability of software delivery

• Documentation and reporting: Partner with leadership to define and report on key metrics. Maintain a centralized repository of release-related information, including release process, release notes, procedures, and dependencies. Provide regular status reports to stakeholders and executive leadership

• Support team escalations and incident response