Environment & Release Specialist

Description:

We’re building thriving communities as one of the UK’s largest housing groups and a leading developer of affordable housing.

We believe everyone is entitled to a good home they can afford, in a place they are proud to live. More than 100,000 people live in our homes.

If you want to experience work that’s truly rewarding, join us. Because when we achieve together, customers and communities thrive.

Work for Orbit. Believe in people.

The role

Orbit have an exciting new opportunity to join our IT team as Environment & Release Specialist. In this role you will own the cross-technology domain release management process, and be responsible for the environment strategy. As the Environment & Release Specialist you will work closely with the wider IT Team and will own the provision of environments as well as ensuring the environment standards are maintained and met throughout the development life-cycle and business as usual.

You will need to will create environment road-maps based on multiple project requirements, set environment guidelines, along with the provision and management of environments (release, refreshes) through the application life-cycle through to release while coordinating environment component refreshes (including obfuscation where required) for testing and operational use.  

This role is part of Corporate Services where you'll help us give colleagues the support they need to be brilliant.

What you'll achieve

In this role of Environment & Release Specialist you will develop, monitor and enforce release management processes and policies whilst providing support to the domain teams as well as to service providers, vendors and customers, by coordinating and providing release management consultation in a timely and efficient manner.

Your key responsibilities will be to:

Coordinate release program activities (for example, cross-domain release integration testing and assessment of release production worthiness) designed to provide key stakeholders with pertinent information, such as summary data, key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics.

Act as the gatekeeper to the production environment, ensuring conformance to policies (e.g. Change Management) and operational processes/procedures, release integration testing and production validation.

Define and agree a release management strategy with third parties and relevant Orbit Stakeholders.

Ensure adequate checks are in place and completed ahead of any release - including managing any risks that affect the release scope.

Communicates release management objectives, concepts and policies across all IT domains and to the business, when appropriate.

Works closely with change managers, the program management office, project managers and the Change Advisory Board to plan releases and manage the release schedule, taking into consideration associated business and technical risks.

What you'll bring

In this role of Environment & Release Specialist you will need to have Release Management experiences for both Agile and Waterfall projects and ideally have knowledge of environment considerations for Power Platform, MS Dynamics 365 CE, MS Dynamics F&O, Azure and Microsoft 365.

Essential skills

Microsoft DevOps,  including pipelines and automation.

Experienced in the practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)

A strong and confident communicator, able to manage internal and external stakeholders effectively

Experience with application and SaaS development release processes. 

Experience creating detailed production implementation plans and performing mock dress rehearsals of a production release environment is desired.

Desirable skills

ITIL certification (Release Management)

Project Management certification (PMP, Prince II etc)

Why Orbit?

Choosing us means being rewarded in every sense.

Here’s what you can expect to enjoy with us.

A rewarding experience that works for you

We strive to create an inclusive experience with benefits and wellbeing programmes designed to help you, and your loved ones, to thrive.  For a better work life balance, we offer flexible working opportunities for many roles.

A place to progress

From training programmes to professional qualifications, we provide opportunities to learn and develop at every stage of your career. Whether you’re a student, graduate or experienced professional we’ll support you to grow.

For leaders, our tailored development journeys are designed to stretch and strengthen your leadership skills. As well as practical training, we give you access to renowned business schools and experiential programmes for greater breadth and depth of learning.

A purpose to feel proud of

We’re proud to make a difference to people together. We’re values-driven with a commercial focus on performance - because the more profit we make, the more we can achieve for people.

What brings us together is a passionate belief in progress and people.

Read more about the values and purpose that drive us on our careers website.

How we hire

We aim to make our hiring process simple and fair:

Online application

Interview(s)

Decision and offer

We put the safeguarding of our customers, colleagues and contractors at the heart of everything we do and as such, certain roles will be subject to a DBS check