Roles & Responsibilities

Four standing roles keep the Agile Release Train running — none of them own a single team's day-to-day work, which stays with that team's own Product Owner and Scrum Master:

• Release Train Engineer (RTE) — the chief Scrum Master for the whole train. Facilitates PI Planning, System Demo, and Inspect & Adapt; tracks and escalates cross-team dependencies and risks. Program management for the train itself — the RTE doesn't own any one team's backlog, they own the train's ability to execute as one. Few companies actually use the title "RTE": Amazon runs this same function through Technical Program Managers (TPMs) or a PMO instead — different name, same job of owning the cadence across teams.
• Product Management — owns the Program Backlog and the train's vision; decides which features get prioritized across every team on the train. Distinct from a single team's Product Owner (see Team's Product Management): Product Management prioritizes across teams, a Product Owner prioritizes within one team's own backlog.
• System Architect/Engineer — owns technical coherence across the train, so independent teams' decisions don't quietly diverge into incompatible systems. The role that catches "each team solved this well on its own, and none of the solutions talk to each other" before it becomes a System Demo surprise.
• Business Owners — the small group of stakeholders with real business and technical accountability for the train's governance, compliance, and ROI. Usually 2–3 people, not a committee — concentrated enough that a real decision can actually get made at Inspect & Adapt, not just discussed.

Team-level roles — Product Owner, Scrum Master — sit one level down, on Team's own Agile / Delivery Process once that page is built.