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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Updater Consultant

💰 $80,000 - $120,000

ITDevOpsRelease ManagementConsulting

🎯 Role Definition

The Updater Consultant is a hands-on technical consultant responsible for planning, executing, and validating software, firmware, data and infrastructure updates across on-premises and cloud environments. This role coordinates release schedules, designs update packaging and automation, conducts risk and impact assessments, leads testing and rollback planning, and ensures compliance and operational readiness. The Updater Consultant partners with product owners, engineering, QA, security, operations, and external vendors to deliver low-risk, high-confidence updates that improve performance, security and feature delivery.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Release Engineer
  • Systems Administrator / Platform Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Release Manager / Release Architect
  • Technical Program Manager (Platform or Operations)
  • Head of Platform Engineering / Director of Release & Deployments

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / SRE Engineer
  • Configuration Management Specialist
  • Automation or CI/CD Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Plan, coordinate and execute scheduled and emergency updates (patches, hotfixes, upgrades and migrations) across multi-tier applications, databases and infrastructure while minimizing downtime and business impact.
  • Lead release management for updates, defining release windows, versioning strategies, deployment orchestration, and rollback procedures that meet SLA and compliance requirements.
  • Build, maintain and improve update automation pipelines using CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) and configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to standardize and accelerate update delivery.
  • Create and validate update packages and artifacts (installer scripts, containers, database migration scripts), ensuring reproducibility and secure provenance through version control.
  • Conduct thorough impact and risk assessments for proposed updates, liaising with product, QA, security and operations teams to identify dependencies, compatibility issues and mitigation strategies.
  • Design and execute comprehensive testing plans for updates, including unit, integration, user acceptance, pre-production dry-runs and post-deployment verification to reduce rollback incidents.
  • Implement and enforce change control and approval workflows in ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management), ensuring auditability and adherence to ITIL processes.
  • Coordinate cross-functional release readiness reviews and communication plans, including stakeholder notifications, runbooks, contingency plans and stakeholder sign-offs.
  • Monitor update rollouts in real time, analyze telemetry and logs (Datadog, New Relic, ELK) for regressions, performance impacts or security anomalies and trigger rollbacks when needed.
  • Develop, document and maintain runbooks, playbooks and run-time procedures for common update scenarios, emergency rollbacks and incident triage to enable predictable execution.
  • Automate rollback and remediation strategies and validate them in staging environments to minimize mean time to recovery (MTTR) after failed updates.
  • Manage vendor-supplied patches and third-party component upgrades, coordinating testing, licensing checks and compatibility validations with internal teams.
  • Orchestrate database schema changes and data migrations during updates, ensuring data integrity, backup verification, and migration rollback capabilities.
  • Implement feature flag and canary release strategies to progressively deploy updates and control exposure to production traffic for risk reduction.
  • Integrate security and compliance checks into update pipelines (SCA, SAST/DAST, vulnerability scanning) and coordinate remediation paths with security operations.
  • Maintain release calendars and capacity plans, estimating resources, duration and downtime windows while optimizing for business availability and peak usage constraints.
  • Mentor and train application owners, platform teams and operations staff on update procedures, automation scripts and post-deployment validation checks.
  • Conduct post-release reviews and root-cause analyses following update incidents, produce actionable remediation plans and incorporate lessons learned into process improvements.
  • Track and report key metrics (release frequency, success rate, rollback rate, MTTR) to leadership and continuously improve release KPIs through process and tooling changes.
  • Implement and maintain configuration and secret management practices during updates (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), ensuring credentials are rotated and not embedded in artifacts.
  • Collaborate with cloud engineering teams to design update processes that support hybrid or multi-cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP) including blue/green and rolling update strategies.
  • Ensure backups, snapshots and disaster recovery procedures are validated prior to major updates and coordinate failover test execution as required.
  • Support compliance audits related to software change control, maintaining evidence of approvals, test results, and implemented mitigations for internal and external auditors.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Release and Patch Management: hands-on experience coordinating updates across application stacks and infrastructure with documented processes and versioning.
  • CI/CD & Pipeline Automation: proficiency with Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions and building repeatable pipelines for deployment and rollback.
  • Scripting & Automation: strong scripting skills in Bash, Python, PowerShell or similar for packaging, orchestration and automation of update tasks.
  • Configuration Management & IaC: experience with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Terraform or CloudFormation to manage configuration and automate environments.
  • Version Control & Artifact Management: robust use of Git workflows, artifact repositories (Artifactory, Nexus) and semantic versioning best practices.
  • Cloud & On-Prem Deployments: practical knowledge deploying updates across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-premises environments; familiarity with blue/green, canary and rolling strategies.
  • Containers & Orchestration: experience with Docker images, Kubernetes deployments and rolling updates in containerized environments.
  • Database Migrations & ETL: ability to prepare, test and execute schema changes and data migrations with minimal downtime and data loss risk.
  • Monitoring & Observability: use of Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, ELK stack for post-deployment verification and incident detection.
  • Security & Compliance: understanding of secure update practices, vulnerability scanning, patch prioritization and regulatory requirements.
  • ITSM & Change Control Tools: experience with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management or similar platforms to manage change requests and approvals.
  • Testing & QA Integration: familiarity with automated testing frameworks and integration of testing stages into release pipelines.
  • Backup & Recovery Strategies: implementing and validating backups, snapshots and DR plans prior to major updates.
  • Networking & Systems Administration: working knowledge of Linux/Unix and Windows server administration, networking basics and load balancing to support update operations.
  • Observability of Rollbacks & Remediation: implementing deterministic rollback scripts and playbooks to recover quickly from failed updates.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication and stakeholder management: able to explain technical risk and status to technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Problem-solving and analytical thinking: diagnose update failures and propose reliable mitigations under time pressure.
  • Detail-oriented and process-driven: create reproducible, auditable procedures and follow rigorous testing checklists.
  • Collaboration and cross-functional leadership: work effectively with product managers, QA, security, and operations to achieve coordinated releases.
  • Time management and prioritization: balance scheduled updates, emergency patches and day-to-day support.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stay current with new deployment patterns, tooling and security practices.
  • Coaching and mentoring: transfer knowledge to junior engineers and raise overall team maturity around updates and deployments.
  • Customer focus: understand business priorities and minimize disruption to end users during updates.
  • Resilience and calm under pressure: lead incident responses and coordinate recovery actions when updates go wrong.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or equivalent technical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.
  • Professional certifications (ITIL Foundation, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications, Certified ScrumMaster, PMP) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems / IT Management
  • Software Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Data Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of progressive experience in release management, DevOps, platform engineering or systems administration.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience managing production updates and releases in medium to large-scale distributed systems.
  • Demonstrated experience with CI/CD tooling, scripting, cloud platforms, configuration management and ITSM/change control processes.
  • Prior consulting or client-facing experience is advantageous for roles requiring cross-organizational coordination and stakeholder engagement.
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