Head of Cloud Architecture

Pinewood.AI

Head of Cloud Architecture at Pinewood.AI focused on Azure strategy and global team leadership. Ensuring cloud infrastructure supports automotive intelligence platform and business goals.

Posted 6/19/2026full-timeSolihull • 🇬🇧 United KingdomLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AzureCloudDNSSQLVault

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Partner directly with the CTO to own the Azure technical strategy, reference architecture and roadmap, translating business goals into a coherent, evolving multi-region design.
Build and lead a global infrastructure team, hiring, mentoring and setting the technical standards, ways of working and quality bar they operate to.
Own and evolve the foundations of the estate: landing zones, management group/subscription topology, naming and tagging standards, and the governance baseline the wider organisation builds on.
Architect for global resilience, including multi-region topologies, availability zones, geo-redundancy, failover and defined RTO/RPO targets, and prove it through testing rather than assumption.
Own secure, performant global networking: virtual networks, subnets, NSGs, peering, hub-and-spoke, VPN/ExpressRoute, Azure Firewall, Front Door/Traffic Manager, private endpoints and DNS.
Maintain and advance the security model end to end: identity (Entra ID), RBAC, Key Vault, encryption, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Zero Trust principles.
Own compliance across multiple jurisdictions, including data residency and sovereignty, mapping controls to relevant frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, regional equivalents) and evidencing them for audit.
Govern at scale with Azure Policy, authoring definitions and initiatives, applying them across scopes, and managing remediation.
Maintain and improve Infrastructure as Code in Bicep: reusable modules, parameterised deployments, and integration into CI/CD pipelines with what-if, policy and security gates.
Own compute architecture across Virtual Machines (sizing, availability zones/sets, scale sets) and App Services (web apps, deployment slots), with clear scaling and capacity strategies.
Own data platforms across SQL Server on VMs (IaaS) and PaaS (Azure SQL Database, Managed Instance), including HA/DR, geo-replication and migration.
Mature telemetry and observability (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights) and the operational practices, alerting, automation, runbooks, cost management, that keep the estate healthy.
Produce and maintain clear architecture documentation, conceptual, network topology, data-flow and deployment diagrams, tailored to engineering, security/compliance and executive audiences, and keep them current as the estate evolves.
Drive constant technical progression: continuously evaluate new Azure capabilities and emerging practices, including AI-assisted IaC and agentic operations, and modernise the platform rather than letting it stand still.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Demonstrable experience architecting and operating production Azure environments at scale, including ownership of a mature, business-critical estate.
Deep, hands-on expertise across the responsibilities above. This remains a building role as well as a leadership one.
Experience building, leading or mentoring technical teams, ideally distributed across regions.
Proven multi-region, highly available and disaster-resilient design experience.
Strong Bicep / Infrastructure as Code skills and CI/CD pipeline integration (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions).
Solid grounding in cloud security and multi-jurisdiction compliance and governance.
Strong architecture diagramming and visual communication skills, ideally including diagrams-as-code (e.g. Mermaid, PlantUML, D2) and standard notation/frameworks such as the C4 model and the official Azure architecture icon set.
A considered view on AI-assisted infrastructure (e.g. AI-generated IaC, agentic operations) and the guardrails, policy, gates, review, that make it safe in a regulated environment.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, comfortable operating at CTO level.
Self-directed and comfortable owning direction with a high degree of autonomy.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary based on experience
Bonus scheme
Share scheme
Hybrid working
25 days holiday plus all UK bank holidays
4x life assurance
Enhanced family-friendly leave - 5 months' full pay for maternity or adoption, plus 2 weeks' fully paid paternity/adoption leave and an extra 2 weeks to use as paid annual leave within 24 months of birth or adoption
Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - free, confidential 24/7 support for you and your immediate family (including counselling, legal & financial advice, and wellbeing resources)
Ongoing training & professional development
Cycle to Work scheme - save up to 40% on bikes and accessories through salary sacrifice
Eyecare vouchers - free eye test and contribution towards prescription glasses
Regular social events
Employee recognition and awards

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Hard Skills & Tools

AzureInfrastructure as CodeBicepCI/CDSQL ServerAzure SQL Databasedisaster recoverynetworkingsecurityarchitecture diagramming

Soft Skills

leadershipmentoringcommunicationstakeholder managementself-directedautonomyvisual communicationtechnical progressionteam buildingproblem solving

Certifications

ISO 27001SOC 2GDPR