Shiva K

Salesforce Release Manager with 8 years of experience delivering enterprise Salesforce solutions across Financial Services, Insurance, and Higher Education.

Salesforce Certified

Administrator, Platform Developer, and Copado Certified professional with expertise in Salesforce DevOps, CI/CD, release management, deployment automation, and environment strategy. Proven success leading full lifecycle Salesforce implementations, production releases, and managed services for large, regulated organizations while ensuring governance, compliance, and platform stability. Experienced in Copado, Flosum, AutoRABIT, Gearset, Salesforce DX, Git, Azure DevOps.

Recognized for mentoring team members, leading client communications, and delivering end-user training in fast-paced Agile/Scrum environments while collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive high-quality releases, reduce deployment risk, and deliver scalable, business-focused Salesforce solutions.

Salesforce Release Manager - AccelerEd - Bethesda, MD

(2023-02)

Deliver ongoing Salesforce managed services for a large organization, owning the end-to-end release process — release schedules, milestones, dependencies, and stakeholder communication of status updates and risks.

• Configure and maintain Copado CI/CD pipelines to automate build, test, and deployment, driving efficiency and reliability across the release pipeline.
• Serve as owner for all hotfix deployments and coordinate approvals with clients in the production environment.
• Manage Salesforce environments, coordinating sandbox refreshes, data migrations, and environment configurations aligned to development and testing needs.
• Implement and improve DevOps practices, troubleshooting complex deployment issues and collaborating with development, testing, and business teams to ensure smooth, timely releases.
• Provide training and support to teams on release management processes.
• Govern Salesforce release management across Development, SIT, UAT, Pre-Production, and Production environments, defining promotion paths, branching strategies, and deployment governance to ensure stable, compliant releases.
• Governed sandbox provisioning, refresh schedules, data masking, and data seeding strategies to provide stable and production-like environments for Development, QA, SIT, and UAT.
• Configure and enforce Copado quality gates, automated validations, static code analysis, and test execution standards, improving deployment success rates and reducing production defects.
• Coordinated Copado platform upgrades, feature adoption, and configuration enhancements in collaboration with Copado support and internal engineering teams.
• Managed forward promotions and back-promotions across multiple Salesforce orgs using Copado while maintaining environment synchronization and metadata consistency.
• Lead release planning activities including scheduled releases, hotfixes, emergency deployments, and rollback strategies while managing production freeze windows.
• Identified and implemented automation opportunities that improved deployment reliability, reduced manual effort, and accelerated Salesforce release cycles.
• Evaluated Salesforce DevOps capabilities and recommended process improvements, automation enhancements, and governance best practices to improve release quality and platform stability.
• Own Salesforce environment strategy including sandbox lifecycle management, refresh schedules, data seeding, environment synchronization, and multi-org coordination.
• Configured and managed Copado deployments using Azure DevOps Git repositories, implementing branch-based development, version control, and automated deployment pipelines across Salesforce environments.
• Leveraged Azure DevOps Pull Requests to enforce code reviews, approval workflows, and merge validation, ensuring code quality, collaboration, and compliance before deployments.
• Managed Salesforce sandbox data and metadata backups using OwnBackup, ensuring secure, automated recovery and minimizing the risk of data loss across multiple environments.
• Configured and executed sandbox data seeding and refresh activities using backup snapshots to provide realistic test data for Development, QA, and UAT environments.
• Leveraged OwnBackup to restore Salesforce data and metadata during sandbox refreshes, release validations, and incident recovery, ensuring environment consistency and business continuity.
• Integrated Snyk into CI/CD pipelines to perform automated security scans on source code, open-source dependencies, and containers before deployment.
• Identified, prioritized, and remediated security vulnerabilities by analyzing Snyk reports and collaborating with development teams to implement recommended fixes.
• Enforced DevSecOps best practices by configuring Snyk security policies, monitoring projects continuously, and preventing vulnerable code from being promoted to higher environments.
• Partner with Development, QA, Product Owners, and stakeholders for release feasibility, risk analysis, and change management planning.
• Manage incident response and deployment failures, performing root cause analysis and improving platform reliability.
• Resolve complex deployment issues including metadata dependencies, merge conflicts, and Copado pipeline failures.
• Designed and maintained Salesforce metadata management processes using Salesforce DX (SFDX), source-driven development, and version control to ensure consistent deployments across multiple environments.
• Ensured Salesforce platform changes complied with enterprise security, audit, data protection, and change management standards before deployment to production.
• Performed metadata dependency analysis and deployment impact assessments to proactively identify risks and minimize production issues.
• Integrated Salesforce deployment pipelines with enterprise CI/CD frameworks, automating validation, Apex test execution, deployment approvals, and production releases.
• Administered Salesforce configuration management, ensuring metadata consistency, version control, dependency tracking, and accurate promotion of configuration changes across Development, QA, UAT, and Production environments.
• Collaborated with QA teams to implement automated testing strategies, enforcing code coverage, deployment validations, and quality standards before production releases.
• Monitored CI/CD pipeline performance and deployment metrics, proactively identifying bottlenecks and implementing process improvements that increased deployment success and reduced release cycle time.
• Provided technical leadership by establishing Salesforce DevOps standards, release governance, branching strategies, and deployment best practices across multiple Agile teams.
• Led Salesforce administration activities including user provisioning, profile management, permission sets, role hierarchy, MFA enablement, login IP relaxations, and access governance across multiple Salesforce orgs.
• Administered security controls, audit logging, and compliance monitoring to ensure adherence to enterprise security policies and regulatory requirements.
• Managed Salesforce production deployment access, enforcing Segregation of Duties (SoD), approval workflows, and deployment governance for secure production releases.
• Supported enterprise audit and compliance initiatives by maintaining deployment documentation, change records, operational runbooks, and release evidence.

Salesforce DevOps & Administration - USAA - Plano, TX

(2019-04 - 2023-01)

Owned end-to-end Salesforce release management lifecycle across Dev, QA, UAT, and Production environments, ensuring controlled, complaint, and high-quality deployments.

• Defined and enforced release governance frameworks, including branching strategies, promotion paths, approval workflows, and audit-compliant deployment controls.
• Led release planning and execution for scheduled releases, hotfixes, and emergency deployments, including risk assessments, rollback strategies, and production freeze window management.
• Designed and optimized Copado CI/CD pipelines with automated deployments, quality gates, and validation processes to improve release efficiency and reduce failures.
• Managed multi-environment release coordination, ensuring environment readiness, dependency tracking, and seamless code promotion across parallel development streams.
• Acted as primary owner for production deployments, ensuring stakeholder approvals, risk mitigation, and minimal business disruption.
• Performed Git-based source control management, including branching, merging, conflict resolution, and back-promotions across environments.
• Conducted deployment readiness reviews, ensuring test coverage, code quality, and compliance requirements were met.

Master of Science - Information Technology - Bellevue University (2017-08)

Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science and Engineering - JNTUH (2014-06)