Environment & Release Manager in Watford

Join our journey to create a new experience for the National Lottery and help us to power change for the greater good. We are Allwyn UK, part of the Allwyn Entertainment Group – a multi‑national lottery operator with a market‑leading presence in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus and Italy. We are the operator of the Fourth Licence (10-year licence) for the National Lottery since February 2024. We have developed ground‑breaking technologies, built player protection frameworks, and have a proven track record of making lotteries better. Our aim is to create one of the UK's most inclusive organisations – where people can bring the best of themselves, to do their best work, every day, for the benefit of good causes.

While the main contribution of the National Lottery to society is through the funds to good causes, at Allwyn we put our purpose and values at the heart of everything we do. We invite you to join us as we embark on a once‑in‑a‑lifetime, large‑scale transformation journey to build a bigger, better, and safer National Lottery that delivers more money to good causes. The role requires the person to be in the office 3 days per week at our Watford office.

ROLE PURPOSE

The Test Environment and Release Manager will own the environment strategy and the release management process that is required to support multiple programs of work across a large architectural landscape. This role will implement automated processes to streamline the release process and ensure environment availability, reliability and stability. This role forms part of the ‘Centre of Excellence’, providing services across agile and end‑to‑end teams.

HOW YOU WILL DO THIS

• Accountable for the creation and implementation of the Environment Test Strategy that will support a broad variety of testing projects across a large and complex landscape architecture.
• Test environment planning and coordination, ensuring environments are available where necessary.
• Test environment configuration and maintenance, ensuring all test environment configurations are understood, documented and are consistent across environments.
• Build real-time dashboards to monitor the health and performance of all test environments.
• Build real-time dashboards that enable software versions to be tracked.
• Manage release related risks, issues, and cross platform deployment dependencies.
• Implement appropriate Test Environment Governance, ensuring the right level of user access and privileges.
• Implementation of the Test Data Strategy ensuring that any production data sets are anonymised.
• Support the QA team in investigating errors found in deployments and providing first line support for environment defect triages.
• Work with QA and development teams to automate the deployment process and strategic move towards Continuous Integration (CI).
• Develop Key Performance indicators (KPI's) to track efficiency of test environment delivery efforts.
• Create and maintain environment roadmaps and plans to deliver test environments.
• Coordination with stakeholders (internal and external) as to the availability of test environments.
• Communicate test environment availability to project management and quality assurance teams.
• Schedule downtime with stakeholders in periods of low usage to minimize impact to ongoing testing activities.

KEY SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Experience of Environment and Release Management, supporting on prem and cloud-based environment strategies.
• Strong knowledge in web application and open‑source technologies, particularly, Java, Apache, Tomcat, web services, API's and service virtualization.
• Experience of working with Linux, AIX and Windows operating systems.
• Knowledge and experience of SQL across various database implementations, including DB2, Oracle and MySQL.
• Understanding of IT security concepts, APM tools.
• Knowledge of different operating systems (Windows / Linux) and Knowledge of AWS.
• Appreciation of different delivery models (Agile/Waterfall) and the effect that utilizing these models might have on the requirements of the Test Environments.
• Understanding of code branching techniques.
• Awareness of development tools used in software development (Jenkins/GIT/Subversion).
• Hands on experience of supporting CI/CD pipelines.

Allwyn is an Equal Opportunity Employer which prides itself in being diverse and inclusive. We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or victimisation in the workplace. All employment decisions at Allwyn are based on the business needs, the job requirements, and the individual qualifications. Allwyn encourages applications from individuals regardless of age, disability (visible or hidden), sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships.