QA Environments Practice Lead in Bury

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with over 60,000 colleagues and over 3,400 stores across several retail fascia in over 30 markets around the world.

JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative, and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day-to-day objectives.

The QA Environments CoE – Practice Lead is responsible for the coordination, governance, and operational management of non-production test environments across the technology landscape. This role ensures that environments are stable, secure, consistent, and aligned to production, enabling successful delivery across programmes, projects, and product teams. It combines hands-on environment management with planning, scheduling, and continuous improvement responsibilities.

The Practice Lead operates within Agile delivery models, working closely with QA, Engineering, Product, and Service teams to ensure environments are fit-for-purpose, optimised, and available to support testing and release activities. This is a non-people-management role, focused on technical coordination, quality advocacy, and environment excellence within the QA CoE.

• Lead Test Environment activities across programmes and projects, ensuring provision and availability of managed environments.
• Define, maintain, and govern Environment Schedules and Plans.
• Provide accurate estimation, progress tracking, and status reporting.
• Act as the primary coordination point for environment-related activities.
• Provide clear communication and reporting on environment availability, risks, and status.

• Define, maintain, and govern environment schedules, plans, and roadmaps.
• Coordinate environment usage across concurrent programmes and product teams.
• Manage conflicts, dependencies, and prioritisation of environment demand.
• Align environment provisioning with project timelines and product backlogs.

• Oversee day-to-day management of non-production environments.
• Coordinate environment provisioning, configuration, and deployment activities.
• Ensure environments are representative of production in terms of configuration and data.
• Manage data refreshes, deployments, maintenance, and system updates.
• Track and manage environment defects, risks, and issues through to resolution.

• Ensure adherence to Change, Release, and Configuration Management processes.
• Maintain control of environment baselines (software, data, infrastructure).
• Ensure environments comply with security, audit, and regulatory standards.
• Maintain documentation of environment configurations, processes, and procedures.

• Work closely with QA, Engineering, Product & Project Teams.
• Support delivery teams by removing environment-related blockers.

• Contribute to and support the QA Environments strategy within the CoE.
• Identify and implement improvements to processes, tooling, and automation.
• Promote adoption of modern practices (CI/CD, DevOps, cloud-based environments).

• Proven experience in QA, Test Environment Management, or related delivery roles.
• Experience working across complex technology programmes and Agile environments.
• Hands-on experience with non-production environments and test support activities.

• Test environment management concepts and lifecycle.
• CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• Cloud platforms (e.g. AWS).
• Environment provisioning, deployments, and data management.
• Broad IT knowledge across infrastructure, applications, and integrations.

• Strong planning, prioritisation, and organisational skills.
• Ability to manage multiple competing priorities in fast-paced environments.
• Clear and effective communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proactive and self-driven with a delivery-focused mindset.
• Strong collaborator with ability to influence without authority.

This role sits at the heart of the QA CoE, ensuring that test environments are reliable, governed, and optimised to support high-quality software delivery. It is a hands-on, coordination-focused role suited to an experienced practitioner who can bridge QA, engineering, and operations while driving continuous improvement—without direct people management responsibility.