Head of Cloud

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!

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.

The automotive classifieds market has stagnated — prices keep rising, innovation has slowed, and the consumer experience hasn't evolved in over a decade. Dealers want alternatives and consumers deserve better.

We acquired Cazoo in 2024 for one reason: brand. Cazoo spent £100M+ building 60% consumer awareness and genuine trust, and that brand equity is irreplaceable. But we didn't buy it to repeat old mistakes — we rebuilt from scratch: new tech stack, new business model, new approach.

Since relaunching in May 2025 we've seen early traction. Now we need a Head of Cloud to ensure our platform is secure, resilient, and ready to scale. Our Azure estate is the backbone of everything - a modern hub-and-spoke landing zone, AKS-hosted microservices, event-driven architectures, and a growing Databricks data platform. We're migrating off a legacy VM estate toward cloud-native services, and we need a leader who can drive that transformation while keeping production rock-solid.

If you've led cloud teams through significant modernisation programmes, built secure and scalable Azure platforms, and can turn infrastructure into a competitive advantage, this is the most impactful cloud leadership role in UK automotive.

What we ideally looking for;

• 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; 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.

Role Requirements

• Several years leading Cloud or Platform Engineering teams, with significant Azure-at-scale experience.
• 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.
• Observability and monitoring (Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty) and FinOps/cost-accountability practices across engineering teams.
• 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.
• WAF technologies - Azure Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, or third-party (Cloudflare, Akamai)
• Container networking and service mesh (e.g. Istio), plus Azure Container Registry

Here’s how we back you:

• We offer an annual bonus scheme.
• We more than match your commitment to your pension, so when you contribute 6%, we put in 9%, taking your total up to 15% of your base salary.
• Quarterly value-led awards with generous cash prizes.
• Referral Bonus: Recommend a colleague, get £2,000.
• 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: We offer 2 volunteer days a year so you can help out wherever matters to you.

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.

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 View email address on click.appcast.io.
• 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.

The Extras

• Your choice of a MacBook or Windows laptop.
• View email address on click.appcast.io: 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.
• Whether it’s our Summer bash or the annual festive party, we make sure we take the time to bring everyone together and celebrate in style.
• Free food & drinks in the office.
• We’re proud partners of Brentford FC, and we share the rewards with you. From tickets to matches to the bucket-list opportunity to actually play on the pitch yourself, we bring you closer to the action.

Diversity & Inclusion at Cazoo

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.