Environment Manager

We are seeking a proactive and experienced IT Environments Manager to oversee the planning, coordination, and governance of all non-production environments across the software delivery lifecycle. This role is critical in ensuring that development, testing, and staging environments are stable, secure, and fit for purpose, enabling high-quality and timely software delivery.
The successful candidate will work closely with Release Management, Delivery Leads, Solution Architects, and Heads of Capability to align environment strategy with delivery needs, manage environment conflicts, and drive continuous improvement in environment provisioning and usage.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage the lifecycle of all non-production environments (development, test, staging, etc.).
• Coordinate environment availability, scheduling, and usage across multiple delivery teams.
• Collaborate with DevOps, Infrastructure, and Application teams to ensure environments are provisioned, configured, and maintained effectively.
• Implement and maintain environmental governance, including access control, data management, and change tracking.
• Identify and resolve environment-related issues, conflicts, and bottlenecks.
• Support release planning by ensuring environment readiness and alignment with release schedules.
• Drive automation and standardisation of environment provisioning and configuration.
• Maintain documentation and reporting on environment usage, incidents, and capacity.
• Act as a key point of contact for environment-related queries and escalations.

Technical Excellence & Best Practices

• Strategic Environment Planning – develop and maintain an environment strategy aligned with the release schedules.
• Environment Lifecycle Management – oversee provisioning, configuration and environment refreshes.
• Close coordination with Release Management to minimise conflicts and environment downtime.
• Plan environment maintenance windows with minimal disruption.
• Environment governance – maintain a centralised list of environments (including environment ownership, purpose and configuration details).
• Optimisation – optimise resource usage to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Collaboration – act as a bridge between development, QA, operations and Release Management team.
• Risk Management – identify and mitigate risks related to environment downtime and configuration drift.

Experience Required

• Proven experience managing IT environments in a complex, multi-team delivery setting.
• Strong understanding of software development and release management processes.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, GCP).
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Strong problem-solving and coordination abilities.
• Experience with environment monitoring, configuration management, and automation tools.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with containerisation (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Knowledge of ITIL practices related to environment and release management.
• Exposure to data masking and test data management practices.
• Familiarity with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps.
  

Behavioural Competencies

• Analytical Thinking: Breaks down complex environment issues
• Adaptability: Responds constructively to shifting priorities and responds positively to change.
• Initiative & Innovation: Anticipates environment-related issues before they impact delivery.
• Decision-Making: Takes informed and timely decisions balancing risk, value, and urgency.
• Collaboration: Works effectively across teams, builds trust, and shares knowledge.
• Communication: Communicates clearly and appropriately for the audience, including stakeholders.
• Customer Focus: Consistently considering the needs, expectations, and impact on internal and external customers when managing environments.
• Accountability: Takes ownership of deliverables.
• Strategic Awareness: Creates an environment strategy to support business and technical objectives.

Admiral: Where You Can

We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We’re committed to fostering a people-first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.

Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.

We’re proud of our people-first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We’re fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.

Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work-life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.

Disability Confident Leader

As a Disability Confident Leader, for candidates with a disability or long-term health condition, that opt into the Disability Confident scheme, we’ll invite a fair and proportionate number of applicants that meet the essential requirements of the role to the first stage of our selection process.

If you need any adjustments or support with your application or during the recruitment process, just let us know. Please do email us. This number is dedicated to supporting candidates that require reasonable adjustments or support during the application process.

#LI-OF1