About IRIS

As one of the UK’s largest privately held software companies, IRIS Software Group exists to simplify the lives of businesses, schools, and organisations. Our operational software is the invisible but essential heartbeat of our customers' success—ensuring critical tasks are handled right the first time, every time.

We help businesses run the tough stuff, stay compliant, and focus on productivity and growth.

The Role

We’re seeking an experienced and highly organised Progressive Release Manager to join our technology team. This critical role will own the planning and execution of phased software rollouts, ensuring new features are delivered safely, efficiently, and with maximum value. This role will be responsible for the transition between delivery and operations to ensure a successful feedback loop. As part of our continued evolution toward progressive delivery, you’ll work at the intersection of product, engineering, DevOps, Business Collaboration, Application SRE/Ops and customer success—coordinating staged deployments that minimize risk and maximize value for users.

You will use industry-leading tools and practices (e.g. CI/CD deployment pipelines, feature flags, canary deployments, A/B testing) to manage rollouts across multiple environments and customer segments, all while ensuring a seamless and resilient deployment experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage the progressive rollout process for software deployments, ensuring timely and stable delivery. Enabling the decoupling of release and deploy and removing the manual efforts of deployment.
• Define and execute staged deployment strategies (e.g. internal testing, pilot groups, incremental percentage rollouts).
• Partner with product, engineering, QA, SRE, and support teams to align on deployment goals, readiness, and rollout criteria.
• Ensure the use of tools such as LaunchDarkly, Split.io, Azure Feature Management, or custom feature flag systems to control and monitor deployment and releases.
• Track performance, customer impact, and error rates throughout the rollout process.
• Lead go/no-go decisions and implement rollback plans when necessary.
• Document, analyse, and continuously improve deploy and release processes and success metrics.
• Drive cross functional standardization of CI/CD deployment strategies, practices and KPIs/OKRs.
• Communicate rollout status, risk, and impact across stakeholders clearly and effectively.
• Ensure appropriate operational automation and documentation exists with error logs, known recovery and automated recovery are in place, as well as necessary telemetry to support operational needs.
• Act as a technical product manager driving backlog of operational needs to drive higher resilience and recovery methods.
• Feedback loop of operational opportunities for resilience in coordination with the Application SRE/Ops.

Required Skills & Experience

• Solid technical background in both application development and deployment models.
• 10 years or equivalent proven experience managing software deployments in agile environments, ideally within SaaS or cloud-based platforms.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred).
• Familiarity with feature flag platforms, canary deployments, and A/B testing strategies.
• Ability to read and interpret performance metrics, logs, and monitoring data (Datadog, AppInsights, etc.).
• Highly organised, with excellent project management, risk assessment, and communication skills.
• Comfortable coordinating cross-functional teams in a fast-paced, high-change environment.
• Hands-on coding experience in .NET, C, plus strong knowledge of SQL and PostgreSQL.
• Strong leadership traits – decisive, calm under pressure, and ready to step into a formal leadership role.
• Strong critical thinking, decision making and strong aptitude to get beyond resolution to the root cause of prevention.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills – able to work effectively across functions and with customers.

Desirable

• Experience with release orchestration tools or platforms (e.g. Spinnaker, Octopus Deploy, Azure DevOps).
• Exposure to SRE or incident response practices.
• Technical background in software engineering or infrastructure is a plus.
• Experience working in regulated or high-compliance environments.
• Strength in performance engineering and tuning.
• Recognised for determination, persistence, tenacity for relentless pursuit to continuously improve.

Why Join IRIS?

At IRIS, you’ll be part of a collaborative, ambitious team that values reliability, resilience, and smart delivery. In this role, you'll help shape how we deliver software at scale—safely, quickly, and confidently. Your work will directly impact thousands of users and the operational heartbeat of their organisations.