Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for an Environment Manager

💰 $110,000 - $165,000

ITDevOpsInfrastructureRelease Management

🎯 Role Definition

As an Environment Manager, you are the central orchestrator and guardian of the pre-production landscape. This strategic role is critical for ensuring that development, testing, and quality assurance teams have stable, reliable, and fit-for-purpose environments to build and validate high-quality software. You will own the environment roadmap, drive automation initiatives, and act as the key liaison between development, operations, and business stakeholders. This is not just a technical role; it's a leadership position that requires a deep understanding of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), a passion for process improvement, and the ability to troubleshoot complex, multi-system issues under pressure. You will be empowered to define standards, implement best practices, and directly impact the speed and quality of our technology delivery.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Senior Systems Administrator
  • Release Engineer
  • Senior QA Automation Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Head of DevOps / Director of Platform Engineering
  • Senior Manager, IT Infrastructure
  • Release Train Engineer (RTE)
  • Cloud Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Senior DevOps Architect
  • IT Project / Program Manager
  • Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own and execute the end-to-end strategy for all non-production environments (Development, QA, Staging, UAT, Performance), ensuring they are consistently available, performant, and secure.
  • Lead the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of complex, multi-tiered application environments, utilizing both on-premise infrastructure and cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Develop and manage a comprehensive environment booking and scheduling system to coordinate usage across multiple project teams, resolving conflicts and maximizing resource utilization.
  • Act as the primary point of contact for all environment-related incidents, leading troubleshooting efforts by coordinating with developers, DBAs, and infrastructure engineers to ensure rapid resolution.
  • Champion and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation to automate the creation and management of environments.
  • Design and govern robust Test Data Management (TDM) strategies, including data masking, subsetting, and synthetic data generation to ensure environments are populated with relevant and secure data.
  • Orchestrate environment refreshes and data seeding activities to align with testing cycles and release schedules, minimizing downtime and disruption to development teams.
  • Define, document, and enforce environment management policies, procedures, and best practices across the organization to ensure consistency and quality.
  • Collaborate closely with Release Management to plan and coordinate deployments, ensuring that environment configurations match the target production state.
  • Maintain a detailed and accurate inventory of all non-production environments, including their configurations, installed software versions, and dependencies.
  • Proactively monitor environment health, performance, and capacity using tools like Datadog, Splunk, or Prometheus, and conduct regular capacity planning to forecast future needs.
  • Drive cost optimization initiatives for cloud-based environments by implementing auto-scaling, resource scheduling, and identifying unused or underutilized assets.
  • Manage environment access control, ensuring that security policies are enforced and that teams have the appropriate level of access required for their roles.
  • Plan and oversee the integration of new technologies and services into the environment landscape, conducting proof-of-concept evaluations and managing their rollout.
  • Serve as the key stakeholder and subject matter expert for environment-related topics in project planning, architectural reviews, and production-readiness meetings.

Secondary Functions

  • Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation for environment architectures, setup procedures, and troubleshooting guides.
  • Generate and present regular reports on environment availability, usage metrics, and incident trends to IT leadership and key stakeholders.
  • Mentor and guide junior engineers and team members on environment management best practices and automation techniques.
  • Participate in the continuous improvement of the CI/CD pipeline, advising on environment-specific stages and quality gates.
  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to assist teams in debugging complex application issues.
  • Contribute to the organization's overall technology and data strategy by providing insights from the pre-production landscape.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate their testing and validation needs into concrete technical environment requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and other agile ceremonies as an integral member of the platform or operations team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), including services like EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, IAM, and Azure VM, VNet, Blob Storage.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proven hands-on experience with tools like Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to automate infrastructure provisioning.
  • Containerization: Strong proficiency with Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) or OpenShift.
  • CI/CD Pipeline Tools: In-depth knowledge of building and managing pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI.
  • Scripting & Automation: Advanced scripting skills in languages such as Python, Bash, or PowerShell for automating operational tasks and creating tooling.
  • Operating Systems: Expert-level administration skills for both Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu) and Windows Server environments.
  • Monitoring & Logging: Experience implementing and using monitoring and observability stacks like Prometheus/Grafana, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Datadog, or Splunk.
  • Networking Concepts: Solid understanding of core networking principles, including VPCs, subnets, routing, firewalls, load balancers, and DNS.
  • Database Technologies: Familiarity with managing and provisioning both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases.
  • Version Control Systems: Mastery of Git, including branching strategies (GitFlow), pull requests, and repository management.

Soft Skills

  • Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and troubleshooting skills to diagnose and resolve complex, cross-functional technical issues under pressure.
  • Communication & Stakeholder Management: Excellent ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences and manage competing stakeholder expectations.
  • Leadership & Influence: The ability to lead without direct authority, guiding teams toward common goals and influencing technical decisions.
  • Project Coordination: Strong organizational skills to manage multiple parallel workstreams, schedules, and dependencies effectively.
  • Strategic Thinking: Capacity to see the bigger picture, anticipate future needs, and develop long-term strategies for environment management.
  • Attention to Detail: Meticulous approach to configuration management, documentation, and process execution to prevent errors.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree or equivalent professional experience in a technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's Degree in a related field.
  • Advanced technical certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Management Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5-8 years in IT, with a focus on systems administration, DevOps, or release engineering.

Preferred: 8+ years of progressive experience, with at least 3-4 years in a role specifically dedicated to environment management, cloud infrastructure, or DevOps leadership in an enterprise-scale organization.

Explore More Careers