At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the strategy and evolution of our Azure cloud infrastructure and team.
- Company: Join Cazoo, a revolutionary leader in automotive retail.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, annual bonus, and generous pension contributions.
- Other info: Dynamic work environment with opportunities for growth and innovation.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in transforming the automotive industry with cutting-edge cloud technology.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in leading cloud teams and building secure Azure platforms.
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 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) of annual leave.
Head of Cloud in London employer: Cazoo
Cazoo is an exceptional employer that prioritises employee well-being and growth, offering a hybrid work model with two days in the vibrant Richmond office. With generous benefits including enhanced family leave, a robust pension scheme, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion, Cazoo fosters a supportive environment where creativity thrives and employees can develop their skills through dedicated learning budgets. Join us to be part of a dynamic team that values your contributions and provides opportunities for meaningful impact in the B2B marketing landscape.
