Environments Manager

6 months contract

Inside IR35

Manchester/hybrid

We are seeking an experienced and proactive IT Environments Manager to lead the development and ongoing management of our environment management capability. This critical role ensures the consistency, availability, and integrity of development, testing, staging, and production environments in support of agile delivery and operational excellence.

The IT Environments Manager will be responsible for enabling a stable and efficient software development and testing process-helping reduce downtime, enhance security, and improve overall software quality. The successful candidate will work across multiple teams and functions, ensuring environment readiness, supporting release cycles, and promoting automation and best practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

The ideal candidate must have demonstrable experience working within the higher education sector, alongside the following:

• Proven experience managing IT environments or infrastructure in a complex, enterprise-level setting.

• Ability to define and maintain a comprehensive environment management strategy across diverse platforms.

• Strong stakeholder management skills, including engagement with technical and non-technical audiences.

• Confident in leading meetings, workshops, and collaborative planning sessions.

• Understanding of secure-by-design principles and knowledge of security and compliance standards in IT environments.

• Strong grasp of application lifecycle management and DevOps processes.

• Experience working with both cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and on-premises environments.

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab).

• Strong communication and interpersonal skills.

• Proactive approach to issue resolution and continuous process improvement.

• Understanding of database management, networking, and system administration concepts.

• Manage the full lifecycle of IT environments including development, QA, UAT, staging, and production.

• Coordinate the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of environments across internal teams and third-party providers.

• Collaborate with development, QA, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure environment readiness and consistent release management practices.

• Maintain an up-to-date environment schedule and forecast future changes or requirements.

• Monitor environment performance, availability, and capacity; troubleshoot and resolve issues efficiently.

• Ensure all environments meet appropriate security, compliance, and configuration standards.

• Lead initiatives to automate environment provisioning and improve efficiency across delivery pipelines.

• Maintain comprehensive documentation, environment diagrams, and knowledge bases.

• Support release and deployment cycles by managing environment refreshes, data masking, and test data strategies.

• Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

• Industry-recognised certifications (e.g., ITIL, AWS, Azure).

• Experience with data masking, synthetic data creation, and environment orchestration tools.