Test Environment in London

The Test Environment Lead owns the strategy, governance and day-to-day coordination of test environments to ensure timely, cost-effective, and low-risk delivery of BAU, Modernization and Strategic initiatives. This role will catalogue environment demand, define and socialise a Test Environment Strategy, implement tooling and controls for environment provisioning and usage, reduce environment complexity (including enabling shift-left testing), manage TEM licensing and training, and act as the primary interface between Central IT, IT Heads of Function (HOFs) and delivery stakeholders.

Key responsibilities

• Strategy, governance & stakeholder alignment
  • Define, socialise and secure sign-off for the Test Environment Strategy supporting BAU, Modernization and Strategic initiatives.
  • Align stakeholders (BAU, Modernization, Strategic initiatives, IT HOFs) on environment life cycle, controls, roles, governance and expected behaviours.
  • Manage controlled exceptions to the strategy and ensure traceability of decisions.
• Demand, catalogue & prioritisation
  • Catalogue all current and planned environments including purpose, required timeframe, architectural/integration scope, classification, licensing, and life cycle status.
  • Maintain and prioritise environment demand against Central IT capacity and delivery plans to optimise provisioning effort and cost.
  • Plan and track environment provisioning, usage and decommissioning to minimise contention and reduce unnecessary spend.
• Design, simplification & innovation
  • Identify opportunities to reduce environment and data integration complexity (eg, environment standardisation, reuse, service virtualisation, synthetic or masked data).
  • Promote shift-left testing by enabling earlier access to environment capabilities and test doubles/virtual services.
• Tooling, automation & controls
  • Work with IT HOFs to select, implement and manage tooling for provisioning, monitoring and controlling environment usage.
  • Integrate environment controls with CI/CD pipelines to improve visibility, traceability and automated life cycle management.
  • Own TEM tools and license management, ensuring compliance and cost optimisation.
• Alignment of test approaches & life cycle support
  • Review and align in-flight Test Approaches to the Test Environment Strategy to ensure consistency, relevance and value.
  • Provide guidance on environment-related testing practices throughout the product life cycle.
• Training, enablement & community
  • Own and deliver the TEM training and socialisation plan across the TMO and other TEM participants.
  • Act as the subject matter lead, supporting teams to adopt TEM processes and tooling.
• Leadership & thought leadership
  • Provide thought leadership and innovation in Test Environment Management, driving continuous improvement and adoption of best practices.
  • Act as the central point of contact for TEM escalation and decisioning.

Required skills & experience

• Proven experience (typically 5-10+ years) in IT environment, test environment or release management roles supporting enterprise delivery across multiple teams or programmes.
• Demonstrable experience with environment catalogue/demand management, environment life cycle and governance.
• Hands-on knowledge of environment provisioning and automation technologies and CI/CD pipeline integration (examples: Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps - or equivalent).
• Familiarity with service virtualisation and test doubles (eg, Parasoft, WireMock, Mountebank, broad concept knowledge).
• Strong stakeholder management skills; experience aligning Business, Delivery and IT leadership.
• Experience managing tooling and license inventories and optimising costs.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; ability to present strategy and secure sign-off.
• Experience producing dashboards and reports for environment utilisation, cost and contention metrics.