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.

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.

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 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.
• 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.

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), plus Azure Container Registry.
• Azure messaging — Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs.
• CI/CD pipelines — Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions.
• API Management platforms — e.g. Azure APIM.
• Azure certifications.