Test Environment Manager

Job Title: Test Environment Manager (TEM)

Experience Level: 15+ years

Role Overview

The Test Environment Manager (TEM) plays a pivotal role in transforming the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) environment. This role requires a strong engineering mindset with a focus on system reliability, automation, and performance in non-production environments. The TEM will lead the design, automation, monitoring, and continuous improvement of test environments to support development, testing, and delivery teams.

Key Responsibilities Operational Responsibilities

• Automate Environment Lifecycle: Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision, configure, and decommission test environments, integrating with CI/CD pipelines.
• Define Service Objectives: Establish and measure Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), such as availability and provisioning time, to ensure environments meet team needs.
• Monitor Health & Performance: Implement observability practices using tools like Prometheus and Grafana to proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Incident Management: Lead incident response for environment-related issues, conducting blameless post-mortems and implementing sustainable solutions.
• Reduce Toil: Identify and automate repetitive manual tasks to improve efficiency and free up engineering capacity.

Strategic & Cultural Responsibilities

• Drive Continuous Improvement: Analyze metrics, incidents, and reports to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.
• Balance Reliability & Speed: Apply error budget principles to manage trade-offs between reliability and delivery speed.
• Promote Reliability Culture: Foster a culture of shared ownership and blameless incident response across development, QA, and SRE teams.
• Capacity Planning: Forecast and plan for future infrastructure needs based on usage patterns and demand.
• Advance Test Data Management: Collaborate with Test Data Managers to ensure test data availability, compliance, consistency, and automated provisioning.

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in observability, monitoring, and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana).
• Expertise in CI/CD platforms (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).
• In-depth knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), as well as serverless architectures.
• Advanced scripting skills in Python, Bash, or similar languages to automate environment management tasks.
• Solid foundation in Linux systems, networking concepts, and database management.

Soft Skills

• Leadership & Influence: Ability to drive adoption of SRE practices and influence stakeholders across technical and business functions.
• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and debugging skills to resolve complex environment issues under pressure.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills to collaborate effectively across teams.
• Adaptability: Proactive, flexible mindset to adapt to evolving technologies and development practices.