Release Manager

Our Mission: Qblox is a deep-tech scaleup headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, with a second office in Boston. We provide advanced quantum control stacks to research labs, quantum startups, and industry leaders. As we scale our highly complex, multi-disciplinary products, we need robust operational leadership to ensure seamless delivery. Your Mission: Owning End-to-End Delivery We're hiring a (Senior) Release Manager, based in the PMO, to own end-to-end release coordination across FPGA, embedded software, software packages, and documentation. This is a full-time, high-impact role with absolute authority over the release process and go/no-go decisions across every contributing team, regardless of their department. Seniority matters here: you need the credibility and executive presence to set and enforce rigorous release discipline with department heads on an equal footing. Key Responsibilities • Release Authority & Planning • Release Decisions: Define release-readiness criteria, run gate reviews, and make the ultimate go/no-go call. While you have full authority over the release itself, department heads will maintain full authority over their people, technical decisions, and resourcing. • Calendar & Requirements: Own the release calendar, dictating what each component must deliver, in what state, and by when (leaving the internal methodology, tooling, and branching up to the teams). • Boundary Definition (RACI): Co-define exact authority boundaries with the CTO, PMO, and component leads to ensure seamless operation. 2. Cross-Functional Coordination & Visibility • Single Point of Contact: Act as the definitive point of coordination across component release managers and the integration lead. • Hardware Dependency Management: Track hardware revisions and availability as a critical release dependency, coordinating with the hardware team so releases are accurately planned against confirmed hardware readiness. • Risk Escalation & Tradeoffs: Surface cross-component risks early and work closely with Product on scope tradeoffs when a component is not ready as planned. • Live Visibility: Maintain an accurate, live view of release readiness across all components and chair cross-component readiness reviews. 3. Process Excellence & Coaching • Coaching & Standards: Set a high bar for what it means to be "release-ready" and develop component release managers to consistently meet that standard. • Metrics & Dashboards: Coordinate a global release dashboard pulling in readiness data from each component and from integration tests. • Documentation Focus: Treat documentation as a fully tracked release stream with its own readiness criteria, ensuring it is never treated as an afterthought.