Environments Manager

About IT Services

IT Services at the University of Manchester is a vibrant and fast-moving department, we focus on delivering excellent customer service and quality services for our staff, students and researchers.

The Team

The role will be joining the Campus Technology Services division within IT Services, comprising multiple teams who support, maintain and administer core technology functions for the University.

The Role

Based within the Technology division, the IT Environments Manager will play a critical role in building and maintaining an environment management capability for IT Services. We are looking for an experienced and proactive IT Environments Manager to lead the management, coordination, and continuous improvement of our IT environments across the software development lifecycle. This is a critical role that ensures consistency, availability, and integrity of development, testing, staging, and production environments in support of agile delivery and operational excellence. The IT Environments Manager will ensure a stable and efficient software development and testing process, helping to reduce downtime, improve security and enhance the overall software quality.

The Person

The successful candidate should be able to demonstrate:

• Proven experience in managing IT environments or infrastructure within enterprise-level IT departments.
• The ability to define and maintain the environment management strategy for the University’s IT platforms and infrastructure
• Management of stakeholder relationships, both within IT Services and the wider University
• Ability to lead both technical & non-technical meetings and discussions.
• Understanding of secure by design principles.
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance standards in IT environments.
• Strong understanding of application lifecycle management and DevOps processes.
• Familiarity with cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and on-premises environments.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab).
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Proactive approach to issue resolution and process improvement.
• Understanding of database management, networking, and system administration concepts

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of IT environments (Dev, QA, UAT, Staging, Production).
• Coordinate environment provisioning, configuration, and maintenance with internal teams and external partners.
• Collaborate closely with development, QA, DevOps and infrastructure teams to have standard release management processes and environment readiness.
• Maintain a detailed environments schedule and forecast usage and changes.
• Monitor performance, availability, and capacity of environments; troubleshoot and resolve environment-related issues.
• Ensure environments are secure, compliant, and consistent with configuration management standards.
• Drive automation and efficiency improvements in environment provisioning and deployment pipelines.
• Create and maintain comprehensive environment documentation and knowledge base.
• Support release and deployment activities by managing environment refreshes and data masking strategies.

Desirable Qualifications / Skills

• Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• ITIL, AWS, Azure, or other relevant certifications.
• Experience in data masking, synthetic data generation, and environment orchestration tools.~

What can you expect in return

Our diverse job opportunities all include a top benefits package that includes many features that are hard to find in the private sector:

• Generous annual leave allowance, including Christmas/New Year closure;
• Pension scheme membership to provide benefits for you and your family;
• Well-being programme with counselling, fitness and leading sports facilities;
• Learning and development opportunities.
• Season ticket loans for public transport.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.
• Workplace nursery scheme;
• Staff recognition schemes;
• Staff discounts on a range of products and services including travel and high street savings.

In fact, there are so many benefits available you can see more of them by clicking HERE

Find out more about our organisation and values:

• IT Services: About us and ITS Practice Charter

When completing the additional information section of your application, please ensure you make reference to the job description and person specification above, as this will form an integral part of the shortlisting process.

As an equal opportunities employer we welcome applicants from all sections of the community regardless of age, sex, gender (or gender identity), ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and transgender status. All appointments are made on merit.

Our University is positive about flexible working – you can find out more here

Hybrid working arrangements may be considered.

Please be aware that due to the number of applications we unfortunately may not able to provide individual feedback on your application.

Please note that we are unable to respond to enquiries, accept CVs or applications from Recruitment Agencies.

Any recruitment enquiries from recruitment agencies should be directed to recruitmentservices.people@manchester.ac.uk

Any CV’s submitted by a recruitment agency will be considered a gift.

Enquiries about the vacancy, shortlisting and interviews:

Please contact our IT Resource Management Team

Email: it.resource@manchester.ac.uk

General enquiries:

Email: recruitmentservices.people@manchester.ac.uk

Technical support:

0161 850 2004 https://jobseekersupport.jobtrain.co.uk/support/home

This vacancy will close for applications at midnight on the closing date.

Please see the link below for the Further Particulars document which contains the person specification criteria.