Cloud & Hosting Lead

Halfords is on a journey - building the future of motoring and cycling and looking for people who want to help shape what comes next. We’re a place for cocreators: people who want to make a real impact, take ownership and be part of something that’s still evolving.

Technology at Halfords is at a turning point. We’re modernising our foundations, sharpening our delivery, and ensuring every technology decision is connected to real commercial and customer outcomes.

We're looking for people who act as trusted advisors to the business, take end-to-end accountability for outcomes, and can balance pace with long-term architectural integrity. Innovation here means practical, scalable solutions, not ideas that stay on whiteboards.

As Cloud & Hosting Lead, you'll take ownership of Halfords' hybrid hosting estate across Azure, AWS, on-premise infrastructure, and colocation environments. This is a strategic leadership position focused on defining the direction of the platform, driving technical improvements, and ensuring our cloud and hosting capabilities are secure, scalable, and fit for the future. You'll be the recognised expert in this space, with accountability for both the ongoing operation of the estate and its continued evolution.

Working closely with engineering teams, architects, application owners, and third-party service providers, you'll oversee cloud platform engineering, hosting operations, cloud migrations, FinOps, and infrastructure governance. Whilst outsourced partners will deliver much of the day-to-day engineering activity, you'll own the platform strategy, roadmap, priorities, and outcomes, ensuring delivery aligns to business needs and technology objectives.

This role offers a unique opportunity to mature and transform an already established environment rather than simply maintain it. We have solid foundations in place, but there is significant scope to improve governance, observability, automation, cost optimisation, and platform consistency. If you've previously led cloud and hosting environments at scale and enjoy balancing strategic thinking with operational ownership, you'll have the opportunity to make a visible impact across the organisation

• →Own the cloud and hosting estate across Azure, AWS, on-premise infrastructure, and colocation environments, ensuring services remain secure, reliable, and scalable
• →Own the organisation's Infrastructure as Code strategy, governance and standards, establishing a consistent approach to cloud platform provisioning and management, driving adoption across all cloud consumers, and ensuring changes are delivered through controlled, auditable and repeatable engineering practices by internal and partner teams
• →Define and deliver the cloud migration roadmap, identifying opportunities to modernise workloads and reduce on-premise dependency over time
• →Lead the ongoing maturity of the cloud platform, implementing governance frameworks, guardrails, automation, observability, and best practices
• →Manage third-party engineering and operations partners, holding them accountable for service quality, delivery performance, and continuous improvement
• →Own cloud cost management and FinOps activities, providing visibility of spend and driving optimisation opportunities across the estate
• →Collaborate with development, data, AI, security, and infrastructure teams to ensure cloud services support current and future business requirements
• →Develop strategic roadmaps, budgets, investment priorities, and platform plans that support long-term organisational growth and technology objectives
  
  

• Proven experience leading cloud and hosting platforms within a large, complex enterprise environment
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Azure, with experience operating or governing multi-cloud environments that include AWS
• Demonstrable experience delivering cloud transformation, migration, or platform maturity programmes at scale
• Understanding of both cloud and traditional on-premise infrastructure, ideally with experience supporting data centres, colocation facilities, or physical hosting environments
• Experience managing outsourced engineering or managed service providers, with the ability to influence outcomes without direct line management responsibility
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management, and communication skills, capable of acting as a trusted advisor to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Commercially aware, with experience managing budgets, technology roadmaps, cloud costs, and investment planning
  
  

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