Release Manager

Overview

Come join Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning development team behind Starfield, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Bethesda Game Studios strives to offer its employees a well-balanced home and work life by providing competitive salaries, a generous benefits program, and offices located in some of North America’s best cities.

With a goal of creating a culture as fun and diverse as our games and our players, we welcome applicants with unique skillsets, experience levels and backgrounds. If you are passionate about making a meaningful contribution to some of the most significant games in the industry we’d love to hear from you!

We will consider candidates for any of our four Bethesda Game Studios office locations: Rockville, MD; Montreal, Quebec; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX.

Responsibilities

Your Daily Life at Bethesda Game Studios

As a Release Manager, you will…

• Own the end-to-end path to live for each release or major milestone, including certification, first-party submission, ratings, and lead final go/no-go decision points.
• Drive release readiness through direct ownership of dependencies, reporting, and issue escalation. Run cross-functional release readiness meetings to ensure alignment, transparency, and clear decision-making.    
• Track and manage release dependencies, risks, and blockers - escalate issues early, resolve them ahead of release, and provide on-call support during release windows.
• Plan, schedule, and lead multi-platform releases across development, QA, operations, platform partners, and publishing teams.
• Maintain release calendars, deployment plans, cutover and rollback strategies, and key documentation (runbooks, timelines, release artifacts).
• Own certification and submission processes across first-party platforms - PlayStation (Sony), Xbox (Microsoft), Nintendo, and Steam - managing platform-specific requirements, ratings board submissions, and release timing with each partner.
• Stay current on all first-party and ratings board requirements and proactively communicate policy and process changes to stakeholders.  
• Provide clear, timely status reporting on release readiness, risks, and outcomes across projects – giving stakeholders and leadership consistent visibility into release health, timelines, and trends.  
• Collaborate with engineering to evaluate, improve, and document build pipelines, branching strategies, and delivery systems - reducing friction, increasing stability, and ensuring releases meet compliance requirements across all platforms.
• Serve as the technical owner of publishing and deployment work, including build readiness, environment coordination, submission timing, and release execution. 
• Maintain a centralized release repository with processes, dependencies, communication lists, release details, and archived final assets, ensuring all submissions meet first-party, ratings board, and broader compliance requirements.
• Drive consistency, predictability, and continuous improvement in how we ship, using data, retrospectives, and feedback.  
• Support and contribute to broader studio and publishing initiatives as needed. 

Qualifications

What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

• You have the required 5+ years of owning end-to-end releases of AAA games through first-party platforms (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo) and major PC storefronts (Steam) 
• You have hands-on experience submitting titles to major and regional age rating boards — including ESRB, PEGI, CERO, USK, ACB, IARC, ClassInd, GRAC, and CSRR — managing questionnaires, content descriptors, resubmissions, and rating certificate delivery across global markets.  
• You’ve demonstrated ownership of AAA release lifecycles across development, QA, platform partners, and publishing — from internal milestone builds and first submission through live, including flighting, and post-launch updates.  
• You have proven experience serving as a primary point of contact with first-party platform partners – managing submission timelines, issues, and escalations directly with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve.
• You have a proven ability to manage risk, drive decisions, and operate effectively under time-critical release conditions.  
• You've owned releases that didn't go as planned and have the hard-won judgment and scar tissue to show for it.  
• You have a strong understanding of the software development lifecycle and deployment practices and workflows.  
• You have experience leveraging automation solutions and tools to streamline workflows and minimize manual effort.  
• You have a minimum of 2 years of experience guiding projects or teams through influence rather than direct authority.

Preferred Skills

Bonus Skills

• You are experienced with operating within a multi-studio or centralized release management structure, including defining team boundaries and shared workflows.    
• You've operated as a technical authority on release readiness while partnering closely with production and live teams.  
• You have a process-oriented mindset with a focus on clarity, accountability, and repeatable execution.  
• You have a high attention to detail paired with the ability to think systemically about end-to-end delivery.  
• You have familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and release tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps) — a plus, but not a substitute for platform certification expertise. 

Salary Range

Release Manager - The typical base pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $75,000 - $155,000 per year.

ZeniMax has different base pay ranges for different work locations within the United States, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently in different geographic markets. The range above reflects the potential base pay across the U.S. for this role; the applicable base pay range will depend on what ultimately is determined to be the candidate’s primary work location. Individual base pay depends on various factors, in addition to primary work location, such as complexity and responsibility of role, job duties/requirements, and relevant experience and skills. Base pay ranges are reviewed and typically updated each year. Offers are made within the base pay range applicable at the time.

At ZeniMax certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, such as merit increases and discretionary bonuses. These awards are allocated based on individual performance and are not guaranteed. Benefits/perks listed here may vary depending on the nature of employment with ZeniMax and the country work location. U.S.-based employees have access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan and company match, short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, wellbeing benefits, paid vacation time, paid sick and mental health time, and several paid holidays, among others.

This position is in a union and represented by the Communication Workers of America.

We embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything we do – from recruiting for our studios, publishing and operations to fostering safe and respectful workplaces that encourage collaboration. Our culture is based on principles of respect, inclusion, and fair treatment and we welcome anyone into our family without regard to race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or age.

Our diversity fuels our innovation and inspires us to create game worlds that bring us closer to the global community of players we serve.