Product Engineering Environment Lead

Interim Environments Lead

Location: UK (Hybrid with occasional travel)
Contract: Interim 6 months

Rate: Inside IR35
Level: Senior Manager/Head of Function
Reporting to: Product Engineering Director

Essential Experience - Please Read Before Applying

We are seeking a technically credible transformation leader who can operate at the intersection of engineering, delivery, operations and commercial decision-making.

Candidates must be able to demonstrate:

• Strong experience leading engineering, DevOps, platform, environment or technology delivery functions within large-scale organisations.




• A solid understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), including software delivery, deployment, testing and release management.




• Experience working within DevOps and CI/CD-led organisations.




• Proven success improving operating models, delivery performance and engineering effectiveness through measurable, metrics-driven change.




• The ability to engage confidently in technical discussions with engineering teams whilst maintaining a strategic leadership perspective.




• Experience leading through complexity, managing escalations and driving outcomes across multiple teams and stakeholders.




• Strong commercial awareness with the ability to translate technical challenges into business value and measurable outcomes.




• Experience operating within complex enterprise environments containing a mix of cloud, on-premise and integrated technology estates.

This role is likely to suit candidates from backgrounds such as:

• DevOps Leadership




• Platform Engineering Leadership




• Environment Management




• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)




• Engineering Enablement




• Technology Operations




• Software Delivery Transformation




• Telecommunications Technology




• Large-scale Digital Engineering Organisations

This role is NOT primarily looking for:

• A hands-on Kubernetes specialist.




• A pure infrastructure manager.




• A traditional people manager.




• A developer focused solely on coding or software configuration.




• Someone whose experience is limited to managing delivery projects without technical engagement.

Success in this role will come from your ability to bring structure to a complex environment, establish clear operational ownership, improve software delivery performance, introduce meaningful metrics and help engineering teams operate at the pace and scale of modern technology organisations.

Key Responsibilities

Lead Environment Transformation

• Simplify and rationalise a fragmented environments landscape.




• Establish clear ownership, governance and ways of working.




• Create scalable operating models supporting software delivery across the SDLC.

Improve Engineering Delivery

• Drive improvements across software delivery, deployment and testing practices.




• Remove bottlenecks impacting release velocity and engineering productivity.




• Improve collaboration across development, testing and operational teams.

Stabilise and Modernise the Estate

• Improve environment availability, consistency and reliability.




• Reduce operational risk through improved resilience and governance.




• Strengthen disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.

Drive Automation and Self-Service

• Champion Environment-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.




• Increase automation across provisioning, deployment and testing activities.




• Improve observability and operational visibility.

Build a Metrics-Driven Environment Function

• Introduce meaningful KPIs and operational metrics.




• Use data to identify improvement opportunities and measure success.




• Support evidence-based decision-making across engineering leadership.

Leadership and Stakeholder Management

• Lead cross-functional teams in a Matrix environment.




• Manage operational escalations and delivery challenges.




• Influence senior technical and business stakeholders.




• Support leadership in defining long-term engineering environment strategy.