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 (UK based) 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. Note from Liam Bennett, Director of Technology: 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; 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. Role 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. Desirable Skills/Experience (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 Perks & Benefits Here’s how we back you: Financials 💰 - 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. 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: We offer 2 volunteer days a year so you can help out wherever matters to you. 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. - 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.