Role: Release Manager -POS System
The Release Manager is responsible for planning, coordinating, governing and executing the deployment of a new Point of Sale (POS) system across multiple retail store locations. The role ensures successful releases and store cutovers with minimal business disruption, maintaining operational continuity while delivering technology transformation objectives. This includes release planning, deployment governance, change management, stakeholder coordination, readiness assessments, cutover management, hypercare support, and post-deployment reviews.
The successful candidate will have proven experience replacing legacy POS systems with modern cloud-enabled or enterprise POS solutions, managing end-to-end store deployments, cutovers, data migration, device integration, user adoption, and hypercare support. The role requires balancing technical deployment activities with business continuity to ensure minimal disruption to in-store sales operations.
Key Responsibilities
Release Planning & Governance
• Develop and maintain the integrated release and deployment roadmap.
• Establish deployment waves and store rollout schedules.
• Define release calendars, milestones, dependencies and Go/No-Go criteria.
• Govern release approvals through Change Advisory Board (CAB) processes.
• Manage release risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies.
• Ensure release compliance with ITIL Release & Change Management processes.
Store Deployment & Cutover Management
• Lead end-to-end POS deployment across multiple retail stores.
• Develop store cutover plans, deployment playbooks and rollback strategies.
• Coordinate deployment activities during non-business hours to minimise sales impact.
• Drive deployment readiness reviews and operational acceptance.
• Manage pilot store deployments before full-scale rollout.
• Oversee hypercare support following go-live
Stakeholder Management
• Coordinate with Business, Store Operations, Infrastructure, Security, Network, POS Vendor and Application Teams.
• Communicate deployment schedules, business impacts and downtime windows.
• Facilitate Go/No-Go meetings and deployment war-room activities.
• Provide regular project status updates to leadership teams.
Environment & Readiness Management
• Ensure application, network, infrastructure and peripheral readiness.
• Validate integration, testing and production deployment prerequisites.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT) sign-off and deployment approvals.
• Ensure training materials and store readiness activities are completed.
• Verify device configuration, licensing and connectivity requirements before deployment.
Risk & Incident Management
• Identify deployment risks and implement mitigation actions.
• Manage deployment-related incidents and escalations.
• Execute rollback procedures if deployment success criteria are not met.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews and lessons learned sessions.
• Track deployment KPIs and release quality metrics.
Required Skills & Experience
• 7+ years of IT delivery experience.
• Minimum 5 years of Release or Deployment Management experience.
• Proven experience replacing a legacy POS system with a modern POS platform.
• Experience delivering multi-store retail transformation programmes.
• Experience managing deployments across 50+ store locations.
• Strong experience in store cutovers and business continuity planning.
• Experience managing vendor-led POS implementations.
Expertise Must Have
Essential • Release Management • Deployment Management • Retail Store Rollout Management • POS Migration Strategy • Data Migration Coordination • Change Management • Cutover Management • ITIL Release Processes • Vendor Management • ServiceNow • Azure DevOps • Jira • Incident Management • PCI-DSS Awareness • Retail Infrastructure Deployment
Expertise Nice to Have
Desired • Retail and POS systems on Dynamics 365 • Azure DevOps / Jira / ServiceNow • CI/CD and DevOps practices • Store Network & Peripheral Integration • PCI Compliance awareness