Practice Lead II, Application Release Engineering

The Practice Lead, Application Release Engineering (ARE) is accountable for building, maintaining, and evolving the culture and community of ARE Practitioners. As a Senior Manager and Practice Lead, you will mature ARE capabilities, set clear standards, and drive adoption across segments. You’ll partner closely with technology stakeholders and platform teams to remove systemic obstacles to flow.

This role oversees a team of AREs and DBAs, focusing on coaching, talent development, technical thought leadership and performance management, while advancing the practice’s capabilities and ensuring solutions are sound and aligned with enterprise standards. The Practice Lead acts as an expert innovator and culture change agent, driving the adoption of new tools, technologies, methodologies, and processes.

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & Talent Development:

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of highly skilled ARE Practitioners, focusing on knowledge, skills, and performance.

• Build and evolve the practice’s capabilities, leveraging advanced knowledge of application release engineering (ARE) frameworks, tools, processes, and procedures.

• Provide overall team leadership, training, succession planning, recruitment and resource management.

• Generate and analyze reports to enable data-driven decisions on prioritizing automation initiatives and measuring team capacity trends, ensuring resources are focused where they deliver the greatest impact.

• Monitor team billing accuracy and financial management, overseeing resource allocation and expense tracking to support operational and budgetary goals.

Practice Strategy & Execution:

• Act as a strategic partner to business and technology stakeholders, driving operational advancement and continuous improvement in release engineering practices.

• Drive the utilization of CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and tooling to improve reliability, speed, auditability, and observability.

• Champion automation and process efficiencies across the release pipeline.

• Ensure best practices that make releases consistent, repeatable, and efficient.

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives and contribute to the knowledge base supporting release, deploy, and integration practices.

Co-lead a center of excellence within the ARE practice, driving knowledge sharing and skill development to elevate capabilities across the practitioner community.

Operational Excellence & Risk Management:

• Monitor assigned functional areas for productivity and efficiency, continually improving delivery capability.

• Manage intake and demand, coordinating resources as required and ensuring effective resource utilization.

• Maintain a culture of risk management and control, supported by effective processes in alignment with risk appetite.

Foster a culture of coaching and self-service, empowering development teams to independently onboard and utilize release pipelines, driving self-sufficiency and reducing reliance on centralized support where feasible.

Continuous Improvement & Innovation:

• Proactively identify key business opportunities, research and recommend enhancements, and develop strategies to achieve recommendations.

• Contribute to the continuous enhancement of knowledge/expertise and keep current with emerging industry trends, new technologies, and best practices.

• Influence the development and implementation of reliable production systems and services to address emerging business needs and strategies.

Qualifications & Experience:

• 8+ years of experience in release engineering, DevSecOps, SRE, platform engineering or software delivery roles.

• Proven ability to manage large teams and develop colleagues.

• Deep understanding of CI/CD systems, deployment automation, infrastructure as code, and the software development lifecycle.

• Technical expertise with tooling and platforms such as, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Azure, GCP, AKS, GKE and common scripting languages.

• Experience with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

• University or post-graduate degree

TD is committed to providing fair and equitable compensation opportunities to all colleagues. Growth opportunities and skill development are defining features of the colleague experience at TD. Our compensation policies and practices have been designed to allow colleagues to progress through the salary range over time as they progress in their role. The base pay actually offered may vary based upon the candidate's skills and experience, job-related knowledge, geographic location, and other specific business and organizational needs.

As a candidate, you are encouraged to ask compensation related questions and have an open dialogue with your recruiter who can provide you more specific details for this role.

Please be advised that this job opportunity is subject to provincial regulation for employment purposes. It is imperative to acknowledge that each province or territory within the jurisdiction of Canada may have its own set of regulations, requirements.