Technical Release Manager

At M&G our vision is: to become the best loved and most successful savings and investment business and we're looking for people who are excited about joining us on our journey. We're digitally transforming and investing heavily in technology and innovation to develop new and improved customer propositions that really raise the bar for our customers. To help us achieve our vision we're looking for exceptional people who live our values and behaviours and who can inspire others; embrace change; deliver results and keep it simple.

We know that an inclusive environment makes us more accessible and ensures we attract, engage, promote and retain exceptional people. We welcome applications from all individuals regardless of age, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity/nationality, disability, or military service and welcome those who have taken career breaks. We will consider flexible working arrangements or home working arrangements for any of our roles and also offer work place accommodations to ensure you have what you need to effectively deliver in your role.

What you can expect from us:
We are committed to creating an environment where you can be exceptional at all you do. To help us deliver this, we promise to:

• Challenge Your Limits by creating a stimulating working environment and providing opportunities for you to be involved in meaningful and challenging work
• Support Your Aspirations with a commitment to learning and development that helps you achieve and build your experience with people who want you to succeed
• Value Your Input whereby leaders and managers will involve you in key decisions, listen to your thoughts and recognise the important contribution you make
• Balance Your Life through a work life partnership that focuses on making this an inclusive, diverse and friendly place to work and offers the flexibility and support that enables everyone to be at their best

How do we support our employees:
All M&G plc employees will be supported in the workplace through our M&G Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). If you need counselling, confidential financial or legal advice. The service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and offers access to qualified professionals who can provide specialist information, advice and support on many issues. It offers a broad range of services, including help with family issues, maintaining work/life balance and mental health support.

At M&G we are just beginning an exciting digital transformation towards a more agile, customer-centric and digital-first way of working. We have lots to improve and plenty of interesting challenges we'd like you to get involved in.

We are on a journey to reinvent how people think about their financial future. Making conversations around retirement easier and more relevant, offering diversified products, rethinking and improving the end-to-end experience for our customers and using technology to effectively engage with them in real time and help them make better decisions about their finances.

The journey has started already, are you ready to join us? We need the best digital minds onboard in order to achieve our goal.

We promote a supportive, diversified, international environment with an engineering culture we're proud of. We encourage personal growth and invest in open-minded engineers keen on learning, who continuously try to make things better.

THE ROLE

To be aligned with Retail & Savings Technology to shape and manage the pipeline of technology changes, i.e. releases, within that portfolio

• Coordinate and d eliver regular, high quality releases into Production following the Agile development process, ensuring releases comply our governance and best practices.
• To engage proactively with portfolios from a release management perspective at all stages of their lifecycle .

• To be fully engaged with the portfolio leads, product owners, project managers, development teams and business and their representatives in order to encourage earlier and continuous release planning .
• To organise and co-ordinate the implementation of releases including overseeing a virtual team across multiple departments
• Run and own release retrospectives t o drive continuous improvement to increase efficiency and effectiveness of release delivery as M&G grows
• Where necessary perform detailed implementation planning taking into account : risks; internal and external dependencies; resources; adherence to controls
• Be available to work out of office hours as required in implementation plans and for BAU

• Administration / Development of the logistic suite based on the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Confluence, Stash, etc.)
• Help develop and drive transformation of the Release Function as we continue to scale and deliver change more safel y and more often.

WHAT WE USE

Some of the frameworks, tools and technologies in our stack - but different expertise is welcome:

• Release Management

• JIRA Release type for all implementation tasks and deployment steps.
• Confluence for all documentation and process.

• Frontend - React for our Design System and SPAs.

• Semantic HTML, CSS / SCSS / CSS in JS, Javascript (ES6), TypeScript, Webpack, Lerna, Yarn and NPM,
• Jest, Enzyme and Cypress testing.

• BackEnd -

• Spring Boot for our microservices ecosystem.
• Cosmos D B on M icrosoft Azure with MongoDB API.

• Kubernetes and Docker for orchestration and containerization.
• Azure DevOps for Repos, CI and Release pipelines.
• Sonar Q ube and Checkmar x for static code analysis and security scanning on both the frontend and the backend.
• Apigee for building and surfacing APIs for system integrations.
• Swiftype, Auth0, Kurtosys , Blazemeter , Akamai CDN and WAF

• Salesforce for CRM.
• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.5 for Content Management
• ETL -

• Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, Change Data Capture, Data Quality
• Oracle DBMS , PL/SQL , Unix scripting , Maestro

E XPECTED COMPETENCIES / EXPERIENCE

• At least 5 years' experience in Release Management owning all types of change through to implementation.
• Experience working in fast paced agile environments .

• Detailed, logical and diligent approach to delivery of releases
• Confident, collaborative and persuasive approach with stakeholders ensuring stakeholders are compliant to the Release and governance process.
• Experience contributing to, and achieving, continuous improvement goals
• Take personal accountability, collaborate with colleagues, make effective decisions and help others operate at their best.
• Operate in a fair, trustworthy, and genuine way with my colleagues and customers.

Don't worry if you don't know everything, we're happy to train people on the technologies you'll need in the job.

People who work at M&G agree that ours is a great place to work with a brilliant team spirit. It's also an innovative, high-performing, commercial environment that's totally focused on customers. You'll receive a competitive salary and reward package. And in a fast-changing world, you'll join an organisation that's leading the way in helping customers achieve their long-term financial goals.

M&G is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Our role as an employer is very simple - to provide the right environment for talented people to do their best work, by respecting, understanding and valuing individual differences.

We welcome applications from individuals who have taken an extended career break, and we are willing to consider flexible working arrangements for all our roles.

We live by four behaviours at M&G and we ask all our employees to:

• Inspire Others - Support and encourage each other, creating an environment where everyone can contribute and succeed
• Embrace Change - Be open to change, willing to be challenged and able to adapt quickly and imaginatively to new ideas
• Deliver Results - Focus on outcomes, set high standards and deliver with energy and determination
• Keep it Simple - Cut through complexity and bureaucracy, be clear and decisive and never overcomplicate things