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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Execute QA Test Data Management strategy and roadmap.
• Design and implement an enterprise test data repository as a source of test data for application development testing.
• Plan, schedule and communicate test system refreshes, time-sliced data refreshes, and on-demand test data requests.
• Coordinate with IT areas for virtual test environments as needed.
• Define test data management architecture and tool strategies.
• Deliver, process implementation and oversight of a newly formed Test Data Management service within the QA and Test Management Department.
• Establish service levels for the Test Data Management shared service, including transparency through reporting and valuation of service.
• Coordinate work of decentralized business application teams while implementing demand management operating models that proactively source and manage test data on multiple concurrent projects.
• Implement methodologies for automated test data generation, test reusability and data privacy.
• Build and maintain a central repository of test data and test environment models across multiple lines of business.
• Define and implement the scope of a release’s test environment and test data needs.
• Maintain and implement the policy framework for ERCOT’s Test Data and Environment capabilities.
• Develop and maintain a gold copy of test data sets for programs, projects and releases.
• Ensure adherence to corporate standards, audit and compliance standards regarding QA practices.
• Identify and implement process improvements in alignment with ERCOT’s testing framework.
• Manage, mentor and coach staff on test data and test environment principles and practices.
• Publish KPIs to communicate delivery practices for test data and test environments.
• Maintain knowledge of emerging trends and industry best practices.
• Support multiple streams of projects of varying complexity.
• Create and meet…