Staff Software Engineer (Release Manager)

Staff Software Engineer (Release Manager) – Pune, India

Are you ready to join a team where your focus is to ensure seamless, secure, and high-quality releases of Western Union’s Global Wallet Platform—powering digital payments and financial inclusion worldwide? Do you thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment where innovation, automation, and operational excellence come together to deliver impact? Then it’s time to join Western Union as a Staff Software Engineer, Release Manager – Global Wallet Platform.

Western Union powers your pursuit

As the Release Manager for the Global Wallet Platform, you will lead the delivery and operational readiness of high-impact releases across multiple markets. The role ensures smooth, secure, and compliant delivery of Wallet & value service capabilities that power the company’s digital wallet ecosystem. Your work will directly influence customer experience, platform scalability, and business outcomes by orchestrating releases across development, QA, infrastructure, and compliance teams.

Role Responsibilities

• Release Governance & Planning
  • Own and manage the end-to-end release lifecycle, from release scoping through deployment and validation.
  • Establish and maintain a comprehensive release calendar covering all global wallet markets, coordinating dependencies across cross-functional teams.
  • Define release governance frameworks, approval workflows, and compliance checkpoints to ensure release integrity and traceability.
  • Facilitate release readiness reviews, go/no-go meetings, and risk assessments to ensure high-quality, stable deployments.
  • Collaborate with program and delivery managers to align release timelines with business priorities and market launches.
• Deployment Coordination & Execution
  • Lead the orchestration of release activities, ensuring synchronized efforts across engineering, QA, infrastructure, and operations teams.
  • Coordinate deployment sequencing, cutover activities, and production validation steps to ensure smooth transitions.
  • Drive automation adoption in deployment processes to reduce manual intervention, increase consistency, and enhance release speed.
  • Work closely with DevOps and Cloud teams to ensure environment consistency, capacity planning, and version control across multiple regions.
• Change & Configuration Management
  • Ensure that all configuration changes and code deployments are properly versioned, approved, and tracked in alignment with compliance standards.
  • Maintain and enhance environment management practices, including development, staging, UAT, and production parity.
  • Oversee the coordination of business and technical changes, ensuring dependencies and sequencing are clearly understood and managed.
  • Collaborate with QA and test automation teams to ensure test environments reflect production readiness conditions.
• Compliance, Risk, and Audit Readiness
  • Partner with InfoSec, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure every release meets regulatory and security standards (e.g., PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC2).
  • Maintain full audit traceability for release approvals, validation results, and production deployment logs.
  • Ensure regional compliance alignment for multi-country wallet deployments, including data residency and transaction security.
  • Proactively identify and mitigate release-related risks, documenting decisions and contingency actions where applicable.

• Stakeholder Communication & Leadership
  • Act as the central communication point for release status, dependencies, and risks across global markets.
  • Deliver executive-level release dashboards highlighting progress, key metrics, and upcoming milestones.
  • Partner with Product, Engineering, and Operations leadership to define and communicate release priorities.
  • Facilitate cross-functional collaboration between geographically distributed teams, ensuring clarity and accountability across time zones.
  • Foster a culture of continuous improvement through retrospectives, feedback loops, and lessons-learned sessions.
• Metrics, Insights & Continuous Improvement
  • Define and monitor key release metrics such as release frequency, deployment success rate, change lead time, and rollback frequency.
  • Develop release analytics dashboards to improve predictability and transparency of delivery outcomes.
  • Identify and drive process improvement initiatives, including automation opportunities, tool enhancements, and governance refinements.
  • Benchmark and implement best-in-class release management practices to increase scalability, stability, and audit compliance.

Role Requirements

• 9+ years of progressive experience in release management, DevOps, or software delivery functions.
• Proven track record managing releases for global, large-scale digital platforms (preferably in fintech, payments, or wallet domains).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, environment management, and modern deployment strategies.
• Experience with tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jira, and ServiceNow for orchestration and governance.
• Strong collaboration skills, with experience aligning cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Excellent organizational, analytical, and communication abilities, with meticulous attention to release details.
• Familiarity with regulatory and compliance frameworks in financial services (PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC2).
• Demonstrated ability to balance speed and stability while ensuring disciplined governance and compliance.
• Agile mindset, able to thrive in a fast-paced, high-performance environment.

We make financial services accessible to humans everywhere. Join us for what’s next.

Western Union is positioned to become the world’s most accessible financial services company —transforming lives and communities. We’re a diverse and passionate customer-centric team of over 8,000 employees serving 200 countries and territories, reaching customers and receivers around the globe. More than moving money, we design easy-to-use products and services for our digital and physical financial ecosystem that help our customers move forward.

Just as we help our global customers prosper, we support our employees in achieving their professional aspirations. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn new skills and build a career, as well as receive a great compensation package. If you’re ready to help drive the future of financial services, it’s time for Western Union. Learn more about our purpose and people at https://careers.westernunion.com/.

Benefits

You will also have access to short-term incentives, multiple health insurance options, accident and life insurance, and access to best-in-class development platforms, to name a few
(https://careers.westernunion.com/global-benefits/). Please see the location-specific benefits below and note that your Recruiter may share additional role-specific benefits during your interview process or in an offer of employment.

Your India-specific benefits include:

• Employees Provident Fund [EPF]
• Gratuity Payment
• Public holidays
• Annual Leave, Sick leave, Compensatory leave, and Maternity / Paternity leave
• Annual Health Checkup
• Hospitalization Insurance Coverage (Mediclaim)
• Group Life Insurance, Group Personal Accident Insurance Coverage, Business Travel Insurance
• Relocation Benefit

Western Union values in-person collaboration, learning, and ideation whenever possible. We believe this creates value through common ways of working and supports the execution of enterprise objectives which will ultimately help us achieve our strategic goals. By connecting face-to-face, we are better able to learn from our peers, problem-solve together, and innovate. 

Our Hybrid Work Model categorizes each role into one of three categories. Western Union has determined the category of this role to be Hybrid. This is defined as a flexible working arrangement that enables employees to divide their time between working from home and working from an office location. The expectation is to work from the office a minimum of three days a week.

We are passionate about diversity. Our commitment is to provide an inclusive culture that celebrates the unique backgrounds and perspectives of our global teams while reflecting the communities we serve. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, religion, political affiliation, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, marital status, or veteran status. The company will provide accommodation to applicants, including those with disabilities, during the recruitment process, following applicable laws.

#LI-Hybrid #LI-HR1

Estimated Job Posting End Date:

10-20-2025

This application window is a good-faith estimate of the time that this posting will remain open. This posting will be promptly updated if the deadline is extended or the role is filled.