QA Environment & Data Lead

JOB SUMMARY

The Test Environment & Data Lead is accountable for the governance, stability, and continuous improvement of all non-production test environments to ensure secure, compliant, and release-ready systems.

This role oversees end-to-end environment lifecycle management, including configuration control, test data governance, environmental use and data refreshes. The lead ensures alignment with Quality Assurance and Release & Change Management standards to minimize operational, product, and data-related risks.

In addition, this role is responsible for maintaining data integrity and consistency across environments by coordinating controlled test data refresh cycles, validating post-migration data accuracy, and ensuring compliance with data privacy, security, and regulatory requirements. Close collaboration with Database, Infrastructure, and Security teams is required to ensure environments are production-representative, audit-ready, and optimized for consistent, reliable, and predictable testing outcomes.

The Environment & Test Data lead serves as a critical quality and data control point, safeguarding both system stability and data accuracy across the non-production landscape.

JOB DUTIES

• Broadly applies principles, theories and concepts related to the profession. A seasoned, experienced professional with an in-depth/full understanding of area of specialization.
• May provide recommendations regarding issues outside the bounds of defined procedures and practices. Demonstrates good judgment in selecting methods and techniques for obtaining solutions.
• Wide latitude for decisions within assignments, programs and projects; impact is generally limited to the project or department.
• Acts as a resource to advise and may at times lead the work of lower level professional and/or support employees. Generally represents the department on projects and may perform in a project leadership role.

ADDITIONAL JOB DUTIES

• Own lifecycle management of Test and Pre-Prod environments
• Maintain environment configuration baselines and version inventory
• Ensure environment readiness before test cycles
• Coordinate provisioning, upgrades, and patching with platform teams
• Monitor environment stability, availability, and performance
• Manage environment scheduling and conflict resolution
• Prevent version drift between QA and Production
• This position will be responsible for executing on the QA Test Data Management strategy and roadmap
• This person will work closely with Release Management, the PMO, Application Services, and other IT areas in design and implementation of an enterprise test data repository to be used as source of test data for application development testing
• This position will also be responsible for planning, scheduling and communicating test system refreshes, time-sliced data refreshes, on-demand test data requests and coordinating with appropriate IT areas for corresponding virtual test environments as needed
• This position requires a highly motivated individual who will leverage his/her technical and business expertise to help ensure test data and test environment objectives, goals and requirements are delivered according to stakeholder expectations
• The individual must be able to work independently and communicate with all levels of management in a timely and accurate manner
• Responsible for defining the test data management architecture and tool strategies
• Responsible for delivery, process implementation and oversight of a newly formed Test Data Management service within the QA and Test Management Department
• Manage and establish service levels for the TDM shared service, including transparency through reporting and valuation of service
• Coordinate work of highly decentralized business application teams while implementing demand management operating models that proactively sources and manages test data on multiple concurrent projects
• Implement methodologies for automated test data generation, test reusability and data privacy
• Responsible for building and maintaining a central repository of test data and test environment models across multiple lines of business
• Responsible for defining and implementing the scope of a releases test environment and test data needs
• Accountable for the maintenance and implementation of the policy framework for ERCOT’s Test Data and Environment capabilities
• Responsible for developing process of maintaining gold copy of test data sets for programs, projects and releases
• Accountable for department operating procedures, processes and adherence to corporate standards
•  Accountable for communication with stakeholders and management
• Accountable for adherence to audit and compliance standards regarding QA practices
• Accountable for identifying and implementing process improvements in alignment with ERCOT’s testing framework
• Manage, mentor and coach staff on test data and test environment principles and practices
• Develop and publish KPIs to communicate delivery practices for test data and test environments
• Responsible for maintaining knowledge of emerging trends and industry best practices
• Ability to support multiple streams of projects of varying complexity
• Ability to create and meet timelines cognizant of business needs and constraints
• Strong leadership, communication, negotiation, and conflict management skills
• Highly self-motivated, driven work ethic, keen attention to detail and exceptional customer service orientation
• Ability to communicate highly technical information in an understandable manner to non-technical audiences through writing and presentations

EXPERIENCE

• Requires minimum 8+ years in IT operations, QA operations, or release management.
• 3+ years managing non-production environments and test data.
• Experience in system design, programming and troubleshooting with relational databases (e.g., Oracle and SQL Server)
• Experience with version control, deployments, and migration governance.
• Strong understanding of SDLC, STLC, and change management.
• Experience in cloud or hybrid environments.
• Demonstrated project management experience managing implementations of new enterprise-wide technology initiatives
• Experience with service virtualization technologies
• Proven track record of effectively working in a highly collaborative environment
• Detailed work experience and knowledge of application integration of DevOp and QA tools used for provisioning test data and test environments
• Familiarity with AI-based environment monitoring or anomaly detection.
• Experience leveraging automation for deployment validation.
• Understanding predictive analytics for environment capacity or failure detection.
• Exposure to synthetic test data generation tools (preferred).

Technical Skills

• CI/CD tools (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub, etc.)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, etc.)
• Monitoring/observability platforms (Splunk, Dynatrace)
• Management tools (ServiceNow, JIRA , Qtest, etc.)
• Other tools (Ansible, Rubric, AppSync)

EDUCATION

Bachelor's Degree: Computer Science, MIS or related field (Required) or a combination of education and experience that provides equivalent knowledge to a major in such fields is required

ERCOT is firmly committed to equal employment for all qualified persons without regard to race, sex, medical condition, religion, age, creed, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, ancestry, veteran status, genetic information or any other protected category under federal, state or local law.

Expected Salary Range:

$122,262 - $207,828