Head of Cloud; Azure

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.

• 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 Fin Ops, 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.

• 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 Dev Sec Ops  and security‑by‑design with Info Sec, enforcing Zero Trust, compliance, and threat mitigation.
• Maintain observability (Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana, Pager Duty) and operational excellence through incident management, on‑call, and continuous reliability improvement.

• 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.

• 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, Express Route, 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 .
• Observability and monitoring (Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus, Grafana, Pager Duty) and Fin Ops/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)
• Azure data services — Data…