Environment & Release Manager in Reading

Our client is seeking an experienced Environment & Release Manager to support a large-scale programme. This is a critical role responsible for ensuring the effective management of non-production environments while governing the end-to-end release and change management process across a complex multi-environment landscape.

The successful candidate will combine strong environment management expertise with release governance experience, ensuring platform stability, delivery readiness, and successful, controlled releases across multiple teams and vendors.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and coordinate the planning, allocation, and scheduling of all non-production environments in line with the programme roadmap
• Manage Dev/Test, Pre-Production, and Performance environments, ensuring availability, stability, and readiness
• Forecast environment capacity and data requirements based on delivery and testing demand
• Act as the central point for triage and resolution of environment-related issues
• Oversee environment lifecycle activities, including patching, maintenance, outages, refreshes, and decommissioning
• Ensure environment performance, monitoring, and stability are maintained at all times
• Manage competing environment demands across delivery teams and stakeholders
• Drive continuous improvement in environment provisioning, data refreshes, and access management processes
• Govern user access controls across all environments
• Conduct root cause analysis and identify opportunities to improve environment efficiency and E2E readiness
• Provide regular reporting on environment status, risks, constraints, and upcoming demand

Release Management

• Own and govern the end-to-end release and change management process across vendors and platforms
• Plan and manage release lifecycle activities, including scheduling, deployment, validation, and post-release reviews
• Maintain and enhance Go/No-Go governance, ensuring all release readiness criteria are met
• Ensure complete auditability and traceability of production releases
• Manage release dependencies, deployment conflicts, and risks to maintain production stability
• Drive automation of build and deployment processes where appropriate
• Ensure robust rollback, recovery, and contingency plans are in place
• Chair deployment readiness, change, and Go/No-Go meetings
• Coordinate release activities across business and technology teams
• Ensure all change controls, approvals, and governance requirements are completed prior to implementation
• Support production releases, issue resolution, and escalation management
• Manage Pre-Production refresh cycles in alignment with testing and release schedules
• Review and approve code and data changes across production and lower environments
• Ensure adherence to SDLC, governance standards, audit requirements, and compliance controls (e.g. SOX)

Required Skills & Experience

We are looking for candidates with demonstrable experience in:

• Environment planning, scheduling, and governance
• End-to-end release and change management
• Coordinating large-scale, cross-functional programmes
• Working within strong governance, audit, and control frameworks
• Managing competing delivery, testing, and release priorities
• Stakeholder management across business and technology teams
• Risk, dependency, and issue management
• ITIL, SDLC, and change governance processes
• Experience in regulated environments
• Knowledge of release automation and CI/CD practices
• Exposure to cloud-based and hybrid environments
• Experience working with multiple vendors and delivery partners

Interested? Apply now with your CV to be considered.