This position is closed and is no longer accepting applications.

Release Manager

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
  • 💴 No salary range given
  • 🏡 Partially remote
  • 🧪 Minimum years of experience unspecified
  • 💬 No Japanese required
  • 🌏 Apply from abroad
  • 🧳 Relocate to Japan

About SmartNews

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

Created to deliver high-quality news from a wide variety of trusted publishers in one place, the SmartNews team works tirelessly to help readers feel good about being informed.

Key benefits

  • Your ideas matter
  • International team

About the position

You will collaborate closely with product managers and engineers from different regions to ensure a timely, efficient and high-quality delivery of product updates across all regions. Your role consists in running the release process, managing timelines and mitigating risks.

In this role, you will also be in charge of developing a scalable release management system, creating the solutions to support multiple products, incident responses, velocity of releases. We highly value curiosity, a proactive and outcome-oriented mindset, as you will be expected to take ownership and collaborate with several teams to deliver change across the organization.

The Team

The Product Frontend group is dedicated to creating and delivering the core app experience for our JP and US products. Our mission is to build scalable systems and innovative features that drive new user experiences and habits. We focus on enhancing the app’s impact by continuously increasing the frequency and quality of positive changes for our users.

Responsibilities

  • Run the release operations across products, including the submission to mobile platforms, dealing with rejections, challenges and scheduling.
  • Develop a scalable release management process that increases the efficiency and quality of the product development across products and regions.
  • Optimize and manage timelines for internal and external releases, ensuring that criteria for release readiness are met (quality, compliance, etc.)
  • Identify potential risks in the release process and develop strategies to mitigate them.
  • Maintain a clear and effective communication with stakeholders about release schedules, progress and issues.

Requirements

  • Experience in managing complex app release cycles and multiple projects simultaneously.
  • Hands-on expertise in mobile app release operations (both Android/iOS), including knowledge about Google Play and App Store dashboards, tools and policies.
  • Technical knowledge about mobile development and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Experience with release management tools (Jira, GitHub)
  • Excellent communication skills to effectively collaborate across teams and roles (across regions and multilingual is a plus)
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a keen attention to detail and the ability to anticipate and mitigate risks.

Nice to haves

While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.

  • Past experience as a mobile engineer (Android, iOS, mobile cross-platform preferred)
  • Experience working across countries.
  • Background in continuous process improvement methodologies
  • Proficiency in automation tools and some scripting languages (e.g., Python, Shell scripting)
  • Business-level communication in Japanese

Meet SmartNews's Developers

Cortland recently joined SmartNews as an engineering manager, where he leads a six person team. He talks about what drew him to the company, his role as a manager, and how they use matrix management to maximize their engineers’ success.

Read their story...

YuCheng is a senior software engineer at SmartNews. He explains the freedom he enjoys at SmartNews: not only from a technical perspective, but also the influence he can have over the direction of the product.

Read their story...

When Robert joined SmartNews as a software engineer, most of his colleagues were Japanese. Since then, it’s grown into an international organization where English is predominantly used.

Read their story...

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