Release QA Engineer III

At Serve Robotics, we're reimagining how things move in cities. Our personable sidewalk robot is our vision for the future. It's designed to take deliveries away from congested streets, make deliveries available to more people, and benefit local businesses.

The Serve fleet has been delighting merchants, customers, and pedestrians along the way in Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago while doing commercial deliveries. We're looking for talented individuals who will grow robotic deliveries from surprising novelty to efficient ubiquity.

Who We Are
We are tech industry veterans in software, hardware, and design who are pooling our skills to build the future we want to live in. We are solving real-world problems leveraging robotics, machine learning and computer vision, among other disciplines, with a mindful eye towards the end-to-end user experience. Our team is agile, diverse, and driven. We believe that the best way to solve complicated dynamic problems is collaboratively and respectfully.

As a
Release QA Engineer III
, you will own the organization and management of our release workflows. You will be part of the quality assurance team responsible for ensuring high-quality weekly releases. We are looking for a candidate with a deep understanding of multi-platform releases; autonomy, cloud, mobile, robot, hardware and embedded firmware, as well as how dependencies need to be managed and the use of feature flags for A/B testing. You will own the release calendar, and provide strategic input into the content of multiple release streams. You will be responsible for the release communications within Serve as well as externally as needed.

Responsibilities

• Help define, and continuously improve release policies, change management procedures and versioning strategies to best support our rapidly expanding programs across software and firmware.
• Manage the software release lifecycle end-to-end from planning, deployment, post-deployment, through collaboration with the rest of QA, as well as TPMs, Operations, technical leads, developers, product and teams.
• Develop and maintain release plans, schedules, and timelines.
• Drive improvements to shorten the time-to-release and increase the confidence in the quality of our production releases.
• Collaborate closely with the rest of the QA team and Systems to ensure that releases are tested thoroughly and meet quality and safety standards.
• Advocate for testing readiness (aka "Ready for QA") including adequate test coverage, test artifacts, documentation and stakeholder communication.
• Define a working cadence with the TPMs on dependencies and timing of release vehicles Drive go/no-go decisions, risk mitigation, and rollback planning.
• Monitor, track and improve communications related to the various releases and their progress.
• Manage release budgets and resources.
• Create and maintain release documentation, ensuring the documentation clearly articulates the impact of each release to the various stakeholders.
• Assist in the continuous improvement of QA processes and methodologies.
• Build internal tools or dashboards to track release status, approvals, and audit trails.
• Manage release communications, including change logs, release notes, incident escalations or occasional safety committee restrictions and reviews.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum 3+ years of hands-on experience in Release Engineering.
• Experience with issue tracking, configuration management tools, workflows, and best practices (e.g., JIRA).
• In-depth understanding of software development lifecycles and release management methodologies (e.g., Agile, DevOps).
• Proficiency with CI/CD tools and technologies.
• Familiarity with project management tools and techniques.
• Ability to thrive in high-ambiguity situations and manage multiple shifting priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong knowledge of version control systems (e.g., Git).
• Commitment to a safety-first mindset in all engineering practices.
• Excellent communication, organizational, and stakeholder management skills.
• Skilled in making data-driven decisions.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience in managing releases in a mixed-environment infrastructure, including Software Engineering, Hardware and/or Quality Assurance environments is strongly preferred.
• Track record of strong cross-functional relationships, reducing deployment friction and building stable and repeatable processes.
• Experience with test automation tools.
• Experience in one or more of the following industries: automotive, robotics, or logistics.
• Experience in data analysis of test results including probability and statistical analysis techniques.
• Experience working in Supply Chain systems or logistics technology.
• Exposure to Fleet Management platforms or operational tools.
• Background in start-up environments, especially during periods of rapid growth or scaling.