Overview

A Test Environment Manager (TEM) is responsible for transforming the SDLC environment with an engineering-focused role that emphasizes system reliability, automation, and performance in a non-production setting.

Role details

Role: Test Environment Manager
Location: London
Work Mode: Hybrid (3 days from office)
Employment Type: Contract
Experience Level: 15+ Years

Responsibilities

• Automate environment lifecycle: Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate provisioning, teardown, and configuration of test environments, integrating them with the CI/CD pipeline.
• Establish service level objectives (SLOs): Define and measure key service indicators (SLIs) for test environments, such as availability and provisioning time, to ensure they meet the needs of development and testing teams.
• Monitor environment health and performance: Use observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana to track the health of test environments, identify bottlenecks, and resolve issues proactively, not reactively.
• Manage incident response: Lead the incident management process for test environment issues, conducting blameless post-mortems to understand root causes and implement lasting fixes.
• Minimize toil: Automate manual, repetitive tasks associated with test environments to free up engineering time for more strategic work.
• Drive continuous improvement: Analyze environment performance data, incident reports, and post-mortems to identify opportunities for continuous improvement and innovation.
• Balance reliability and speed: Use an "error budget" for test environments. If environments are highly reliable, teams can use the budget for quicker feature development; if reliability is low, focus shifts to improving stability.
• Instil a reliability culture: Promote a blameless culture around test environment incidents, encouraging shared ownership and collaboration between development, QA, and SRE teams.
• Capacity planning: Anticipate future resource needs of test environments by analysing usage patterns and project forecasts to ensure the infrastructure can scale to meet demand.
• Advance test data management: Work with Test Data Managers to ensure test data is readily available, consistent, compliant, and automatically provisioned with environments.

Technical Skills

• Expertise with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana), CI/CD platforms (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI), and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).
• Cloud infrastructure knowledge: Deep understanding of cloud platforms like AWS, including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and serverless computing.
• Scripting and programming: Strong scripting skills in Python or Bash to automate environment management tasks.
• Systems and networking: Solid understanding of Linux, networking concepts, and database management.

Soft Skills

• Leadership and influence: Ability to champion SRE practices and influence stakeholders across teams.
• Problem-solving: Strong analytical and debugging skills for investigating and resolving complex environment issues under pressure.
• Communication: Excellent communication and collaboration to bridge development, QA, and operations teams.
• Adaptability: Proactive and adaptable mindset to keep pace with evolving technology and methodologies.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Contract

Job function

• Management and Manufacturing

Industries

• IT Services and IT Consulting