Head of Cloud (Azure)

Cazoo, is the ultimate destination for car enthusiasts and buyers alike! As a leader in the market, we pride ourselves on providing unparalleled search tools, expert car guides, insightful reviews, and a comprehensive vehicle price guide. Our mission is simple: to empower buyers to find their perfect car efficiently and with confidence, while also helping automotive retailers reach millions of eager buyers.

At Cazoo, you'll be part of a team that's revolutionising the way people buy and sell cars. If you're ready to drive your career forward in a dynamic, fast-paced environment, Cazoo is the place for you. Join us and be a part of shaping the future of automotive retail!

About the Position

Role: Head of Cloud (Azure)

Reports To: Director of Technology

Contract Type: Full Time, permanent

Location: Richmond, UK (Remote)

About the Role

A senior leadership role owning the strategy, reliability, and evolution of our entire Azure estate - infrastructure, networking, cloud security, budget management, and platform engineering. You'll report to the Director of Technology, manage a team of Cloud Engineers, and own the platform underpinning our consumer-facing products, data platform, and internal tooling. The estate runs a hub-and-spoke landing zone, AKS-hosted microservices, event-driven architectures, and a growing Databricks data platform, and we're migrating off a legacy VM estate toward cloud-native services. You'll balance perfection against expediency to meet business needs, embedding yourself across technology, product, and commercial - setting expectations, building trust, and striking the right balance between short- and long-term goals.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership

• Define and own a 3–5 year cloud strategy for Cazoo across infrastructure, networking, security, and platform engineering.
• Drive migration from the legacy VM estate to a cloud-native platform (AKS, Azure Functions, managed services).
• Design and maintain the Azure Landing Zone - hub-and-spoke topology, subscription management, and governance policies.
• Partner with Product, Commercial, and Engineering leadership so cloud accelerates business outcomes; represent Cloud & Security on the Technology Management Team, shaping strategy, culture, and ways of working.
• Manage cloud budgets, drive FinOps, and oversee third-party vendor relationships.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering, automation, and self-service platform capabilities that improve developer productivity and operational efficiency.

Platform & Infrastructure

• Deep expertise designing and operating secure Azure networking architectures, including hybrid connectivity, segmentation, routing, ingress and identity-aware access patterns.
• Ensure secure, scalable operation across AKS, Azure Functions, and remaining VM workloads.
• Own infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Helm, ensuring consistency and repeatability across environments.
• Champion DevSecOps and security-by-design with InfoSec, enforcing Zero Trust, compliance, and threat mitigation.
• Maintain observability (Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty) and operational excellence through incident management, on-call, and continuous reliability improvement.

People & Culture

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing Cloud team, foster an engineering culture of feedback, continuous learning, and technical excellence.
• Give feedback, recognise great work, and support career development through PDPs; own and improve team engagement scores.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across the wider technology organisation, not just the Cloud team.
• Bring a calm, steadying presence during incidents and high-pressure periods, and foster an architectural mindset across cloud and infrastructure teams.

Requirements

• Several years leading Cloud or Platform Engineering teams, with significant Azure-at-scale experience.
• Azure networking: hub-and-spoke, VNets, VPNs, NSGs, ASGs, firewalls, DNS, ExpressRoute, hybrid connectivity.
• Designing, building, and operating secure, scalable Azure platforms (AKS, Azure Functions, managed PaaS).
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Helm, including IaC best practices and governance.
• Proven cloud migration and modernisation programmes (legacy VM → cloud-native).
• Azure security: Key Vault, Managed Identities, RBAC, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy, Microsoft Entra ID.
• Strong grasp of SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Developing technical strategies for a cloud/infrastructure discipline and gaining senior-stakeholder buy-in; giving clear, actionable direction in complex situations to keep teams aligned.
• Exceptional communication - translating technical direction for non-technical stakeholders - and a natural coaching/mentoring style.

Nice to Have

• WAF technologies - Azure Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, or third-party (Cloudflare, Akamai)
• Azure data services - Data Lake Storage, Databricks, AI Search, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL Flexible Server
• Container networking and service mesh (e.g. Istio)
• Azure messaging - Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs
• CI/CD pipelines - Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions
• API Management platforms - e.g. Azure APIM
• Azure certifications

We Offer

Financials 💰

• Annual bonus scheme.
• Pension matching: 6% from you, 9% from us, totaling 15% of your base salary.
• Quarterly value-led awards with generous cash prizes.

Work-Life 🏖️

• 25 days (plus bank holidays) (increasing after 2 years service)
• Hybrid role, two days a week based in our Richmond office
• Family Enhanced leave after 6 months of service:
  • Maternity/Pregnant Parent Leave: 20 weeks at 100% pay.
  • Paternity/Non-birth Parent Leave: 12 weeks at 100% pay.
  • Volunteer Days: 2 volunteer days a year.

Health & Peace of Mind 🏩

Comprehensive cover so you (and your favourite people) have the care you need.

• AXA Private Healthcare: High-level coverage for you, partners, and dependents-including pre-existing conditions.
• Bupa Dental: Level 2 coverage for cashback on preventative, restorative and emergency care.
• Private GP: 24/7 digital access via Help@Hand.
• Income Protection: 13 weeks of sick pay, before going onto Long term Illness cover with Canada Life
• Life Assurance: 4x basic salary covered by Unum.
• Specialist Support: Free counseling and menopause/fertility support via Peppy.

Your Growth 🌱

We hired you for your talent, and we’re committed to helping you expand it.

• Learning budget and continuous development opportunities. Every manager has a dedicated budget for your specific role development.

The Extras 🔍

• Your choice of a MacBook or Windows laptop.
• Perks@Work: Discounts at over 30,000 retailers and entertainment venues.
• Annual conference with top tier industry guest speakers. Past guests include names like Matthew Syed and Damian Hughes.
• Summer bash and annual festive party.
• Free food & drinks in the office.
• Proud partners of Brentford FC, with shared rewards like tickets, matches, and the opportunity to play on the pitch.

About the Company

The best ideas come from people with different backgrounds, experiences and ways of thinking. At Cazoo we are a place where people feel comfortable speaking up, contributing and growing. Bring your perspective. Bring your experience. Be yourself.