Product Manager - SAP Release Manager

Being part of Air Canada is to become part of an iconic Canadian symbol, recently ranked the best Airline in North America. Let your career take flight by joining our diverse and vibrant team at the leading edge of passenger aviation.

Air Canada seeks a highly motivated and experienced Product Manager (SAP Release Manager) to lead the end-to-end planning, governance, coordination, and execution of SAP releases. The role acts as the central point of coordination across Product and Project teams, Application Management Services (AMS), SAP functional and technical teams, Basis, Quality Assurance, integration teams, vendors, and business stakeholders. The successful candidate will oversee release activities across DEV, QA, UAT, PRE-PROD, and PROD environments, ensuring that scope, dependencies, testing, deployment readiness, cutover, and production stabilization are effectively managed. The ideal candidate thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced, and continuous-improvement delivery environment.

Responsibilities:

• Own and maintain the integrated SAP release calendar covering projects, enhancements, defect fixes, upgrades, patches, maintenance activities, and emergency changes.
• Plan and coordinate major, minor, maintenance, and emergency releases, including milestones, scope-control checkpoints, readiness criteria, and deployment schedules.
• Coordinate release scope and dependencies across Product, Project, AMS, SAP functional and technical, Basis, QA, integration, vendor, and business teams.
• Lead release planning, readiness, and go/no-go forums, ensuring decisions, risks, issues, dependencies, and actions are clearly documented and communicated.
• Coordinate release activities and environment demand across DEV, QA, UAT, PRE-PROD, and PROD environments.
• Identify and resolve environment scheduling conflicts across concurrent projects, AMS enhancements, defect remediation, regression cycles, maintenance, and technical upgrades.
• Partner with SAP Basis and technical teams to ensure environments, transports, interfaces, jobs, security, and supporting services are ready for planned release activities.
• Coordinate impact assessments for upcoming SAP changes and document cross-functional, integration, business, and operational impacts.
• Partner with QA and delivery teams to develop integrated testing schedules covering unit, system integration, end-to-end, regression, performance, and User Acceptance Testing.
• Ensure all release components meet agreed entry and exit criteria and have the required technical and business approvals before deployment.
• Track release-level defects and facilitate risk-based decisions for unresolved issues that could affect timelines, quality, or production stability.
• Develop and coordinate deployment, cutover, rollback, contingency, communication, and post-deployment validation plans.
• Coordinate production deployment sequencing across SAP functional and technical teams, Basis, integrations, AMS, vendors, QA, and business teams.
• Oversee release communications, production validation, stabilization, and transition to operational support.
• Maintain release dashboards and provide clear status reporting to leadership and impacted stakeholders.
• Define and track release performance measures, including schedule adherence, deployment success, release-related defects, production incidents, and stabilization outcomes.
• Facilitate post-release reviews, capture lessons learned, and improve release governance, templates, controls, and automation.
• Ensure compliance with organizational change, release, security, audit, and production-control requirements.
• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences and lead through influence across cross-functional teams.

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline, with at least 5 years of relevant experience. Demonstrable equivalent experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in SAP Release Management, SAP delivery, SAP landscape/environment management, Application Management Services, or a comparable enterprise technology role.
• Demonstrated experience coordinating complex releases across SAP development, testing, pre-production, and production environments.
• Strong understanding of SAP change, transport, release, testing, cutover, deployment, and production-support processes.
• Experience coordinating integrated testing, User Acceptance Testing, regression testing, defect management, cutover, and production stabilization.
• Experience managing multiple concurrent projects, enhancements, and dependencies in a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong stakeholder-management, facilitation, organization, communication, negotiation, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to provide clear direction and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with SAP S/4HANA is preferred.
• Experience with SAP Cloud ALM, ServiceNow, Jira, or comparable lifecycle and release-management tools is preferred.
• ITIL certification or practical experience with IT Service Management processes is an asset.
• Experience working with AMS providers, system integrators, vendors, and globally distributed delivery teams is an asset.
• Airline or travel-industry experience is an asset but is not required.
• Demonstrated punctuality and dependability to support team success in a fast-paced environment.

Conditions of Employment:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest at the time any offer of employment is made and are responsible for obtaining any required work permits, visas, or other authorizations necessary for employment. Prior to their start date, candidates will also need to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the country of interest.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees’ unique contributions to our company’s success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.