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 will 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 will 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.
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, fostering 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.
* 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
* 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
Perks & Benefits
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.
* Referral Bonus: Recommend a colleague, get £2,000.
Work‑Life
* 25 days (plus bank holidays) (increasing after 2 years of 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
* 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
* 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.
* Social events including a Summer bash and an annual festive party.
* Free food & drinks in the office.
* We’re proud partners of Brentford FC, and we share the rewards with you.
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