Senior Release & Service Operations Manager (Automotive)

Location: Hybrid in Mountain View, California, United States

Company

hirify.global is a California-based Honda division building mobile application experiences for Honda's Hybrid and Electric Vehicle market.

What you will do

• Own the software release lifecycle from planning and scope definition through development, QA, deployment, and post-release validation.
• Define release schedules, milestones, readiness criteria, cutoffs, and visibility into features, fixes, dependencies, and commitments.
• Work with Engineering on Git branching, merges, cherry-picks, backports, release branches, build dependencies, CI/CD workflows, versioning, and deployment processes.
• Coordinate QA readiness, defect triage, retesting, regression testing, and verification of fixes across distributed engineering teams.
• Establish production readiness criteria, monitoring, support handoffs, rollback procedures, escalation paths, incident communication, technical triage, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Improve release traceability and reduce manual coordination using tools, scripts, dashboards, Jira, GitHub, CI/CD platforms, APIs, and test management systems.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in Technical Release Management, Release Engineering, DevOps, Software Engineering, Technical Program Management, or a closely related technical delivery role.
• Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle from requirements and development through testing, deployment, and production operations.
• Hands-on knowledge of Git, including branching, merges, cherry-picks, backports, and release management strategies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, modern build and deployment workflows, and coordinating releases across multiple engineering teams and complex software environments.
• Ability to understand backend architectures, REST APIs, distributed-system integrations, and dependencies.
• Working knowledge of production incident management, change management, troubleshooting, and service operations.
• Ability to read code, interpret logs, investigate technical issues, and collaborate with software engineers.
• Experience with Jira, GitHub, and modern development and testing tools.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management, problem-solving, independent decision-making, risk identification, and ability to maintain clarity in complex environments.

Nice to have

• Scripting or automation experience with Python, Bash, JavaScript, or similar languages.
• Experience with mobile application releases across iOS and Android.
• Experience with backend services, cloud platforms, microservices, connected-device architectures, automotive software, connected vehicles, telematics, or hardware/software integrations.
• Experience with TestRail, automated testing, or release traceability tooling.
• Familiarity with ITIL or ITSM practices, including incident, problem, and change management.
• Experience working with international teams, particularly Japan-based stakeholders, Japanese organizations, or cross-cultural US–Japan engineering environments.
• Business-level or conversational Japanese proficiency.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement in Mountain View, California.
• Collaboration across Engineering, Product, QA, Support, and Honda stakeholders in the United States and Japan.
• Work on connected vehicle and mobile platforms for Hybrid and Electric Vehicle products.
• Contract employment.