Cloud Platform Lead — Azure, AWS & Hybrid

Halfords; England; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Pension

Life assurance

25 days annual leave

Job summary

Halfords is seeking a Cloud & Hosting Lead to own and evolve a hybrid hosting estate across Azure, AWS, and on‑premise environments. You’ll define the platform strategy, drive improvements, and ensure security, scalability and alignment with business outcomes.

You will work with engineering, architects and partners to mature cloud governance, automation and FinOps, while balancing strategic thinking with operational ownership across a large enterprise.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading cloud and hosting platforms in a large, complex enterprise environment.
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Azure and multi-cloud environments including AWS.
• Experience delivering cloud transformation, migration, or platform maturity programmes at scale.
• Understanding of on-premise infrastructure and data centres or colocations.
• Experience managing outsourced engineering or managed service providers.
• Leadership, stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Commercial awareness with budgets, roadmaps, and cloud costs.

Responsibilities

• Own cloud and hosting estate across Azure, AWS, on‑premise infrastructure and colocation.
• Define and govern Infrastructure as Code strategy with auditable practices by internal and partner teams.
• Define and deliver cloud migration roadmap to modernise workloads and reduce on‑premise dependency.
• Mature cloud platform with governance, guardrails, automation, observability, and best practices.
• Manage third‑party engineering/operations partners and ensure performance.
• Own cloud cost management and FinOps activities across the estate.
• Collaborate with development, data, AI, security and infrastructure teams to meet business needs.
• Develop strategic roadmaps, budgets, and platform investment priorities.

Skills

Cloud leadership

Stakeholder management

Communication

Budget management

Tools

Azure

AWS

Job description

Halfords is seeking a Cloud & Hosting Lead to own and evolve a hybrid hosting estate across Azure, AWS, and on‑premise environments. You’ll define the platform strategy, drive improvements, and ensure security, scalability and alignment with business outcomes.

You will work with engineering, architects and partners to mature cloud governance, automation and FinOps, while balancing strategic thinking with operational ownership across a large enterprise.