- Managed the Change & Release Management Team located in Raleigh, NC overseeing 600+ releases annually, providing guidance on daily activities, training, and opportunities for skill development; as a people manager, conducted formal performance reviews and provided constructive feedback aiming to maximize both personal growth and the team’s efficiency towards the company's goals.- Monitored release cycles and identified opportunities to promote standardization and process improvements using Lean Six Sigma principles for 100+ applications, resulting in more reliable releases, increased production stability, and prevention of audit points, achieving a 99.3% release success ratio.- Reported on delivery metrics by analyzing data from multiple sources to identify trends, drive improvements, and provide better visibility to upper management and key stakeholders.- Partnered with agile teams, project managers, and senior stakeholders to guide on required release artifacts, approvals, planning, and securing release dates and resources navigating across company-wide events and freezes.- Coordinated hundreds of weekly agile releases and several major events, such as infrastructure upgrades and data migrations, collaborating with dozens of teams and stakeholders to remove impediments and ensure 300+ successful and timely releases to production. - Organized and led a weekly call with all stakeholders and agile teams to review and discuss upcoming releases and provide proper handover to production support, reducing the number of handover calls to just one per week.- Performed compliance and risk analysis on the documentation provided by the agile or application team to ensure process adherence, identify risks, missing dependencies and provide approval for the release to proceed.- Chaired the Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting to review, approve, or reject 80+ releases per week based on the change assessment, risk, concerns, and discussions on the call.

- Streamlined the release process by partnering with the application teams to identify recurrent, low-risk change types and creating pre-approved release templates to allow on-demand deployment, reducing time to market for 15% of releases.- Revised release requests, documentation (code version, testing, sign-offs, business impact), and performed risk analysis ensuring process adherence, preventing audit points, and sustaining production stability on 100+ releases per year.- Facilitated communication between cross-functional teams including Production Support, Developers, Testers, Agile Teams, and stakeholders during release planning and go-live events to aid in the removal of impediments and ensure a smooth transition to production. - Created release plans by discussing and analyzing the requirements with the application teams and consolidating all release artifacts into one main plan, listing all dependencies and timelines, for easier coordination and execution.- Coordinated the go-live calls and scheduled release windows to secure weekly, monthly, and quarterly deployment slots for certain critical applications, by verifying the company’s block dates, external dependencies, and the application requirements.- Represented the releases on the weekly Change Advisory Board (CAB) call to secure approval for go-live by discussing the changes and demonstrating the release readiness.- Trained the application teams in the Release Management process and the reasons behind each requirement to receive better deliverables, thus reducing the amount of re-work.- Developed a script using PowerShell to automate data loading by reading dozens of CSVs, performing validation, categorization, and generating the final set of files to be loaded, resulting in less human intervention, errors, and faster release preparation.

- Headed the off-shore Configuration Management team, from 2009 onwards, leading up to nine people in Brazil and India, coordinating all the team’s activities, 24x7 on-call support, vacations, and holiday coverage to ensure proper support 365 days per year.- Led discussions with the client, SPRINT-Nextel (T-Mobile), to report on status, discuss improvements, issues, and upcoming plans.- Prepared test environments (system test, end-to-end, load & performance) each quarter to receive the new codebase, coordinated required changes for database, queues, and third-party applications; deployed the application and performed initial shakeout.- Developed and maintained build and deployment scripts for C++, Java, and DataPower applications using Shell Script, Perl, and Apache Ant, integrating into a Jenkins pipeline.- Managed the SVN codebase, all test environments, and the build and deployment process to ensure consistency and integrity of the code across all environments for proper testing and release to production.- Participated in all agile ceremonies, sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog refinement, discussing configuration changes, environment requirements and constraints to be considered.- Revised the list of tested and approved code to be promoted to production, created the final deployment package and the release deployment plans for weekly, monthly, and quarterly releases.- Conducted in-room training classes for the department in Unix, IBM DataPower, and troubleshooting techniques by using the materials provided by the company and showing real-life examples experienced daily.- Fostered an inclusive environment with plenty of opportunities for new challenges and skill development for personal and career growth, resulting in a fun, talented, and committed team.

- Used Borland C++ Builder and FireBird database to develop the “File Manager” application which received voicemail files from an Audio Response Unity (ARU) and stored them at the correct place for future user retrieval.- Communicated with stakeholders and team members to understand the project goals, cross-application dependencies, and set integration standards.- Identified the requirements, created use cases, designed, and coded the entire application from scratch using design patterns and multiple threads ensuring performance under load.- Used clean programming techniques and proper code commenting to enhance future maintenance and facilitate the creation of the user manual.- Created and ran test cases to identify defects, and performed end-to-end, load, and high availability tests to ensure proper system integration, performance, and atomicity.