The following skills are highly desirable :

- 11+ years of IT experience, with 5-7+ years in Technical Release / Environment / Delivery Governance roles, operating at programme or portfolio scale.

- Proven experience leading complex, multi-team release landscapes , ideally supporting Lending or regulated customer products in the UK.

- Strong understanding of Agile, DevOps, and SAFe-style delivery models, with the ability to integrate release management seamlessly into modern product delivery.

- Good to have - Hands-on experience with cloud-native release management, preferably on Microsoft Azure (Azure DevOps/Pipelines, AKS, Helm, Key Vault, APM), Jira\Confluence.

- Deep knowledge of deployment strategies such as blue-green, canary, feature toggles, and rollback patterns in high-availability environments.

- Strong dependency and risk management skills across application, infrastructure, data, security, and third-party integrations.

- Ability to operate confidently at Lead level, influencing senior stakeholders, resolving delivery conflicts, and enabling decision-making across labs and domains.

- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to translate technical release risks into business and regulatory impact.

- Experience defining and tracking release KPIs and DORA-style metrics to drive continuous improvement.

- Strong governance mindset with practical experience supporting audit, compliance, and regulatory change without slowing delivery.

- Comfortable working across UK-India delivery models, coordinating time zones, and enabling consistent delivery outcomes.