Senior Engineering Manager - Release Engineering

Every line of code that ships at Mercury passes through a gauntlet of builds, tests, and gates before it reaches our customers. On the surface, that process should feel seamless — frictionless for engineers, undetectable to users, and impossibly reliable. Behind that invisibility is Release Engineering. Mercury moves fast. We ship frequently, our monorepo grows daily, and the pressure to do it right never lets up. Release Engineering is the team that makes this possible: owning the CI/CD platform, build infrastructure, deployment tooling, and the practices that let 400+ engineers deliver with confidence. We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead this team. You'll partner with the Backend Developer Experience team to deliver the full software delivery lifecycle from code commit to production, and build the engineering culture that keeps our release process a competitive advantage rather than a bottleneck. In this role you will: Lead and grow a team of four engineers focused on CI/CD infrastructure, build systems, deployment automation, and developer tooling. Create a strong culture of operational excellence, with measurable improvements to pipeline reliability, build times, and deployment confidence. Own Mercury's release pipeline end-to-end — from pull request merge to production — ensuring it is fast, reliable, observable, and secure. Drive the strategy and execution for improving build performance, test reliability, deployment safety (canaries, feature flags, rollbacks), and developer velocity. Partner closely with Platform, Security, and Product Engineering teams to design and deliver systems that meet the demands of a rapidly scaling fintech. Establish and evangelize release engineering best practices across Mercury's engineering org — defining standards for deployment frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR. Balance long-term platform investments with the day-to-day reliability needs of 400+ engineers shipping code every day. Build and maintain tooling that enforces compliance checkpoints and audit trails as part of the release pipeline — without slowing teams down. Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier engineers; help them grow into technical leads and raise the overall bar for the team. You should have: 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering teams in high-growth or high-availability environments. Deep hands-on experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI) and the infrastructure that supports them. Strong background in build systems (Bazel, Buck2), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar). A track record of meaningfully improving release velocity and reliability — you measure what matters and use data to drive decisions. Experience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments, ideally fintech, payments, or banking. Excellent cross-functional communication skills — you can translate between engineering depth and business impact, and you partner effectively with Security, Compliance, and Product leaders. A pragmatic philosophy: you believe release infrastructure should be a force multiplier for product engineers, not a bureaucratic hurdle. The ability to attract, develop, and retain exceptional talent — you take hiring and team development seriously. What Success Looks Like: In your first 90 days, you've developed deep context on Mercury's release infrastructure, built trust with your team, and identified the highest-leverage opportunities to improve pipeline performance and developer experience. Within six months, you've shipped meaningful improvements to build reliability, deployment speed, or observability — and your team has a clear roadmap for the next year. Over time, you've made Mercury's release process a model for how fintech companies can move fast without breaking things. Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industr