Test Environment Lead — Test Environment Management (TEM) in Slough

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 lifecycle, 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 lifecycle 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 (e.g., 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 lifecycle management.
  • Own TEM tools and license management, ensuring compliance and cost optimisation.
• Alignment of test approaches & lifecycle 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 lifecycle.
• 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 lifecycle 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 (e.g., 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.