Release Manager - Hawthorn East

We’ve been proudly serving Australian communities since 1914 and have grown to become a top 30-listed company on the ASX with a portfolio of iconic homegrown brands. At the heart of our continued success is over 115,000 team members working across the country, all contributing to bringing our customers smiles. You’ll not only get to see your work make a difference, you’ll be part of a team working together to help Australians eat and live better every day.

About the team

Our Technology team is the backbone of the business, building and maintaining the information technology infrastructure that support Coles Group. As a part of the Technology team, you get the opportunity to work through complex, challenging, meaningful problems using large data sets and new technologies to expand your skills and experience.

About the role

At Coles, our technology teams power one of Australia’s largest retail ecosystems. We’re looking for a Release Manager to lead the delivery, quality, and readiness of technology releases across our platforms—ensuring seamless, reliable experiences for millions of customers and team members.

As a Release Manager, you will oversee end-to-end release validation, ensuring all deployments are tested, compliant, and production-ready. You’ll work closely with Engineering, Product, Quality, and Operations teams to align development with release readiness while driving continuous improvement in release governance and delivery practices.

This role is critical in maintaining system stability, minimising risk, and enabling high-quality, business-critical releases in a complex enterprise environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead release planning, scheduling, and coordination across multiple teams and platforms
• Ensure quality gates, testing, and approvals are completed before deployment
• Manage release risks, dependencies, and governance processes
• Drive release readiness and quality assurance, including defect management and traceability
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to align development with production readiness
• Continuously improve release frameworks, automation, and DevOps practices
• Analyse release outcomes, incidents, and defects to improve future performance
• Act as the central point of contact for release quality, readiness, and communication
• Contribute to release strategy, roadmap, and engineering quality uplift

About you and your skills:

• Extensive commercial experience in release management, software engineering, or quality engineering
• Strong experience leading releases in agile, large-scale enterprise environments
• Proven ability to manage complex, distributed systems and environments
• Expertise in release planning, governance, and environment management
• Hands-on experience with tools such as Jira, Xray, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, and GitHub
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps, and test automation practices
• Knowledge of observability tools (e.g. DataDog, Splunk)
• Technical familiarity with C#, Java, ReactJS, and modern architectures (event-driven, domain-driven)
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills
• Ability to lead across teams without formal authority and drive outcomes

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What’s in it for you?

• Flexible working options: We know that work is only one part of your life, so we actively encourage a positive work-life balance and provide hybrid working options to help you achieve it.
• Office perks: Take advantage of our gym facility and fitness classes, free parking, BBQ area, mini-Coles supermarket, fooderie hub where you can sample new products before they hit the shelves, school holiday program and so much more when you come in.
• Discounts: Eligible team members receive 5% discount all year round on your Supermarket and Liquor online and in-store purchases. We also offer additional periods of double discount (10%) at various times throughout the year. As well as hotdeals exclusive to team members that translate into additional savings.
• Reward through recognition: Give and receive recognition, linked to our Coles values, through our digital recognition platform ‘mythanks’. You can accumulate points to redeem in the online shop for exciting gifts and electronic gift cards from an extensive range of retailers.
• Opportunities for learning and development: No matter where you start within our diverse business, you’ll have experiences, exposure, and education to satisfy you. Discover and explore a variety of career development programs and job-specific training.
• Paid parental leave: We understand how important your life outside work is and offer permanent team members paid parental leave to support you in balancing work and family.
• Investment in your future: Our annual team member share plan offer allows eligible team members to make regular pre-tax salary sacrifice deductions to purchase Coles Group shares.

About the recruitment process

We’re continuing to build a gender equitable team, and a culture that is just as diverse, inclusive and welcoming as the communities we serve. We are committed to creating a workplace that is safe and respectful for our team. We encourage applications from people of all ages, cultures (including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), abilities, sexual orientation and gender identities.

We’re happy to adjust our recruitment process to support candidates with disability. For further information and additional contact details visit the ‘Our Recruitment Process’ section of our careers site or email inclusionrecruitment@coles.com.au

Job ID: 180021

Employment Type: Full time