Oracle Test and Release Manager

Join us at EIT:

At the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), we’re on a mission to translate scientific discovery into real world impact. We bring together visionary scientists, technologists, engineers, researchers, educators and innovators to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges in four transformative areas:

• Health, Medical Science & Generative Biology
• Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture
• Climate Change & Managing CO₂
• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics

This is ambitious work - work that demands curiosity, courage, and a relentless drive to make a difference. At EIT, you’ll join a community built on excellence, innovation, tenacity, trust, and collaboration, where bold ideas become real-world breakthroughs. Together, we push boundaries, embrace complexity, and create solutions to scale ideas from lab to society. Explore more at www.eit.org.

Your Role:

At EIT we are seeking a Test and Release Manager with demonstrable experience to lead the ongoing Oracle Fusion test and release cycle across HCM, Finance and SCM, including procurement and inventory. You will own the release calendar and customer communications, organise business engagement and testing, and coordinate the safe introduction of agreed capabilities into service. This internal, business-facing role will reduce the release coordination and administration burden on functional leads while retaining their process expertise and customer ownership.

Working closely with functional leads, architecture, QA resources, business users and delivery partners, you will align recurring updates with project-delivered changes and make release readiness visible. The separate delivery team retains IBM programme management; authorised business and service owners retain acceptance and risk decisions. You will plan readiness around Oracle’s scheduled SaaS updates and coordinate discretionary feature activation through EIT’s approval processes.

Your Responsibilities:

• Own and maintain the ongoing Fusion test and release calendar, covering scheduled platform updates, regression testing, agreed feature activation and dependencies with project releases. Plan around Oracle’s mandatory update timetable, including the approximately two-week test-to-production window for quarterly updates.
• Run a repeatable internal release workstream: identify upcoming changes, coordinate impact assessment, socialise relevant capabilities with customers, secure participation, organise testing and prepare agreed changes for service.
• Work with the junior architect, under the Systems Architect’s oversight, to understand technical changes, capability assessments and dependencies. Use functional leads’ business-process expertise to translate these into testing priorities and customer impacts.
• Maintain clear customer communications on release scope, business impacts, test activities, required decisions and production changes. Build close on-site relationships and agree realistic commitments with business users.
• Define risk-based test plans and entry and exit criteria with QA resources, functional leads and business UAT owners. Cover critical end-to-end journeys, role and access checks, integrations, data reconciliation, reporting and relevant non-functional requirements.
• Coordinate UAT schedules, environments, approved test data, access, scripts and evidence. Resolve participation gaps early and align business availability with supplier delivery commitments.
• Maintain a reusable regression suite and traceability between changes, requirements, test cases, defects and acceptance evidence. Coordinate execution across internal resources, IBM, Oracle CSS and other suppliers within agreed scopes; undertake selected hands-on testing where allocated.
• Lead defect triage, agree severity and priorities with business and technical owners, track fixes and retesting, and escalate unresolved issues with clear business impacts and recommended mitigations.
• Prepare release-readiness evidence covering test outcomes, outstanding defects, residual risks, business acceptance and operational readiness. Route decisions to authorised owners; obtain receiving service-owner acceptance separately from business UAT sign-off.
• Coordinate approved production rollout, release communications, support handover and post-release validation with technical and service teams. Ensure recovery or rollback arrangements are appropriate to the change and platform constraints.
• Liaise with the separate IBM delivery programme team on overlapping releases, milestones, dependencies and shared environments or people. Retain ownership of the recurring internal cycle while preserving programme-management and functional-owner responsibilities.
• Coordinate testing and rollout of prioritised new capabilities, including approved AI and agentic functionality. Confirm required licence, security, privacy and architecture approvals with accountable owners before activation.
• Secure supplier knowledge transfer, test assets, documentation and support handover for agreed backlog catch-up work and new capabilities, building a sustainable internal release process.
• Measure regression effort, concurrent release demand, user-coordination workload and resource capacity. Recommend the appropriate balance of hands-on QA and release coordination, report bottlenecks and improve coverage, automation and cycle efficiency.

Essential Skills, Qualifications & Experience:

• Degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, a related discipline, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• Proven experience leading enterprise application testing and release coordination, including recurring Oracle Fusion Cloud updates and project changes.
• Practical understanding of Oracle Fusion HCM, Finance and SCM business processes, with the ability to coordinate specialists across modules and dependencies.
• Strong experience in regression testing, system integration testing and business UAT, including risk-based planning, defect triage, traceability and readiness evidence.
• Experience coordinating business users and external suppliers, securing customer engagement and managing competing operational and delivery priorities.
• Ability to perform and review hands-on tests, interpret results and improve reusable test assets while coordinating a wider execution team.
• Working knowledge of SaaS environment management, integrations, access controls, data reconciliation and operational acceptance.
• Clear communication, sound judgement and confident escalation of capacity constraints, unresolved defects and release risks.
• Experience using Jira or equivalent tools to manage tests, defects, changes and supporting evidence.

Desirable Skills Qualifications and Experience:

• ISTQB, ITIL or equivalent testing or service-management certification.
• Experience with test automation and maintaining repeatable regression coverage for enterprise applications.
• Experience working with IBM, Oracle CSS or comparable enterprise application delivery and support partners.
• Familiarity with Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle reporting tools, and testing AI or agentic workflows, including outcomes, permissions and exception handling.
• Experience introducing new application capabilities, coordinating supplier knowledge transfer and supporting adoption in a growing organisation.

We offer the following benefits:

• Salary (dependent on experience) + travel allowance + bonus
• Enhanced holiday. Our annual leave allowance is 25 days plus 8 bank holidays and an additional 3 days between Christmas and New Year. You will also have the opportunity to purchase an additional 5 days annual leave in January and July.
• Pension - Employer contribution 7.5%, minimum employee contribution 5%
• Life Assurance.
• Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance as standard for you, your partner and any dependents. Including hospital Cash Plan
• Employee discounts
• Electric car scheme
• Nursery Salary Sacrifice scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Family Planning
• Neurodiversity support including advise and assessments
• Coaching & Therapy services

Working Together – What It Involves:

• You must have the right to work permanently in the UK with a willingness to travel as necessary.
• You will live in, or within easy commuting distance of, Oxford (or be willing to relocate). This role will require you to work on a hybrid basis and you must be able to commit to working in the office 3 days per working week.