bhg-inc - Copado Release Lead

• Release Planning and Coordination • Lead end-to-end release planning across multiple Salesforce environments, including Dev, UAT, Staging, and Production. • Define and maintain release schedules, milestones, and sprint-to-release mappings in alignment with Agile/Scrum delivery cadences. • Manage all release-related work items, epics, and tasks in Jira, keeping boards, backlogs, and roadmaps accurate and up to date. • Coordinate across developers, admins, QA, architects, and business stakeholders to ensure releases are well-scoped and ready for deployment. • Manage and prioritize user story promotion queues, resolving blockers and escalating risk items proactively. • Anticipate downstream impacts of every planned release and raise questions early rather than discovering gaps at deployment time. • Sandbox Refresh Management and Planning • Own the end-to-end sandbox refresh lifecycle for all Salesforce sandboxes across the environment landscape. • Build and maintain a Sandbox Refresh Calendar in Jira, scheduling refreshes well in advance to minimize disruption to development and testing cycles. • Proactively engage all stakeholders before each refresh: confirm readiness, identify in-flight work that could be lost, and communicate blackout windows clearly. • Coordinate post-refresh activities, including data masking, configuration restoration, connected app re-authorization, and integration re-pointing. • Identify and track sandbox-specific dependencies (custom settings, named credentials, external system endpoints) and ensure they are restored consistently after every refresh. • Maintain a Sandbox Inventory in Jira, documenting each sandbox's purpose, current branch alignment, refresh frequency, and owner. • Proactively ask teams the hard questions: What are you currently building in this org? What will you lose if we refresh now? What does your testing window look like for the next sprint? • Evaluate sandbox health on a recurring basis and recommend refresh cadence adjustments as the release pipeline evolves. • Collaborate with the Copado Admin to ensure sandbox connections and pipeline configurations are re-validated after every refresh. • Team Mentorship • Lead a small team of Release Support Specialists responsible for day-to-day promotion support, sandbox coordination, and Jira hygiene. • Assign work, set priorities, and run regular team stand-ups to keep the team aligned and unblocked. • Serve as the escalation point for your team when release blockers, merge conflicts, or environment issues arise. • Change Advisory Board (CAB) Participation • Attend and actively participate in CAB meetings, representing the release team and advocating for deployment readiness. • Prepare and present CAB change requests for all production deployments, including scope, risk assessment, rollback plan, and testing evidence. • Ensure all changes submitted to CAB are documented in Jira with sufficient detail and traceability before the meeting. • Proactively raise questions in CAB when scope, timelines, or risk levels are unclear. Do not allow ambiguity to reach production. • Maintain a CAB readiness checklist in Jira and validate that every deployment meets the checklist criteria before submission. • Collaborate with the Change Manager and Compliance team to keep CAB submission templates and governance policies current. • Copado Pipeline Management • Administer and optimize Copado CI/CD pipelines (Metadata Pipeline and/or Source Format Pipeline) across all environments. • Configure and maintain Copado pipeline actions, connection behaviors, and continuous delivery settings. • Manage promotion records, deployment steps, and quality gates to enforce governance standards. • Utilize Copado's branching strategy, including feature branches, promotion branches, and org branches, to ensure clean and conflict-free promotions. • Manage back-promotions, rollbacks, and hotfix pipelines as needed. • Monitor Copado Continuous Delivery settings and troubleshoot automated deployment failures. • Quality Gates and Governance • Define and enforce quality gates at each pipeline stage, including static code analysis, Apex test runs, and automated test execution. • Ensure all promotions meet acceptance criteria before advancing to higher environments. • Review and approve user stories for production deployment in collaboration with the development and QA teams. • Monitor deployment frequency, lead time, change fail rate, and mean time to restore using Copado DevOps Analytics. • Identify bottlenecks in the release process and drive continuous improvement initiatives. • Environment and Branch Management • Maintain environment health across all Salesforce sandboxes, ensuring orgs are synchronized with their corresponding Git branches. • Oversee the Sandbox Refresh Calendar to coordinate refreshes with minimum impact on active development and QA cycles. • Manage Git repository hygiene, including branch naming conventions, merge conflict resolution, and branch cleanup post-release. • Stakeholder Communication • Serve as the primary point of contact for all release-related communications to both technical and business stakeholders. • Produce clear release notes, deployment runbooks, sandbox refresh notifications, and post-release summaries. • Facilitate release readiness reviews and go/no-go decision meetings. • Communicate release and refresh impacts, risks, and mitigation plans in plain language to non-technical audiences. • Never let a question go unasked. This role is expected to surface ambiguity, challenge assumptions, and drive clarity at every stage. • Compliance and Security • Ensure all deployments comply with organizational change management policies and audit requirements. • Collaborate with the Compliance Officer and Security Engineer to validate that permission sets, field-level security, and access controls are correctly configured before release. • Maintain accurate audit trails of all promotions, deployments, and sandbox refresh events within Copado and Jira.