Architect

Campaign Brief

The Company

The used car industry is the largest retail market in the UK with over 8m annual used car transactions worth £50bn+. It is a vast market which is highly fragmented, inefficient, and ripe for disruption. Our mission is to transform the way people buy cars by providing a transparent, no-pressure buying environment where consumers can simply and seamlessly purchase and finance a used car entirely online.

Cazoo founder & CEO, Alex Chesterman, has already raised 450m in funding from DMG Ventures, Draper Espirit, General Catalyst and Octopus Ventures, amongst others, to expand the Cazoo world. Our accelerated rate of expansion has resulted in Cazoo being crowned the fastest-ever unicorn in the UK.

The platform launched in late 2019, and through the execution of a hugely successful, nationwide marketing strategy, we have got off to a flying start. We have had an incredible 300% increase in growth year on year and now have over 1500 head count across the business. We’ve acquired some amazing brands such as Cluno, Smart Fleet Solutions & Drover to help expand our range of services to our customers in the UK & Europe.

We have a great team who love cars as much as they love improving customer experiences. We are Customer Obsessed, Data Driven, Fast Drivers and Team Players. We are building an environment to maximise productivity through ensuring everyone has autonomy, mastery, and purpose in their work.

Our team has an incredible track record of building successful consumer platforms, our model has been proven in other geographic locations, and the huge used car market in the UK is ready for a new approach. We want to deliver a trusted brand, frictionless service, and convenient platform for our customers that becomes the go-to destination for all used car purchases in the UK.

By joining us now, you’ll be taking part in an exciting high growth stage of our journey, with the chance to directly influence decisions that will ensure our future success.

The Role

Having successfully launched late in 2019, our key focus has been to continue adding new, bespoke services to our platform in the most efficient way possible. We are undertaking a number of greenfield projects that will help us realise our ambition of becoming the market leader in the used car industry.

Our Product Engineering team has five domains Merchandising, Orders, Operations, In-Life and Platform, with multiple cross-functional teams in each domain. We employ over 250+ people across the whole of Product Engineering. Our immediate priority is to continue scaling to increase our velocity, allowing us to enhance the customer experience at a faster pace.

As we move into this new phase, we are looking to hire an Architect for each domain to work closely with our Chief Architect, and directly manage a small team of Principal Engineers. You will be responsible for overseeing the technical direction of your domain.

You will work across our Engineering teams and multiple projects, making key decisions around tooling, architecture and processes. It will be your role to ensure that the Engineering teams have a clear architectural plan, and that everyone is committed to its successful delivery.

To deliver our initial launch, we made use of and integrated with third-party solutions for services such as headless ecommerce, headless CMS and 360-degree imagery, allowing us to focus on building out bespoke solutions for our most critical systems. We are now working to replace many of these 3rd party solutions where we can gain a competitive advantage from using our own bespoke alternatives.

Key features that are being prioritised over the coming months include enhancing our payment options, building out our customer self-service, or improving the architecture of our logistic systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Responsible for the technical governance of your world, defining system boundaries and making key technology decisions.

• Creating key designs including API and Event schemas and ensuring every system has an architecture journal. • Designing new features and functionality that will enhance our customer experience, improve efficiency and

effectiveness of our core systems. • Make use of Event Driven Architecture, APIs built in Nodejs, Typescript and AWS serverless technologies including

Lambda functions. • Design front-end pages for our customer facing systems using React.js, HTML5 and CSS3.

• Ensure our high standards are being met through the adoption of TDD, pair programming and collaborative modelling.

• Coaching and mentoring the wider team – running workshops, lunch & learns, code reviews and encouraging adoption of best practices.

• Encouraging our culture of “you build it, you run it”, facilitating engineers to deploy their own code and take responsibility for CI/CD pipelines.

• We believe that trust is the foundation of a successful team. You will build meaningful relationships with engineers, ensuring they have focus and are motivated.

• You will empower teams to be autonomous, helping them self-organise around workflows and processes they find useful.

• You will improve decision making, and drive towards the best outcomes by facilitating debate and encouraging a diversity of perspective.

What we need from you

• Owned the design of a software architecture for a complex event-driven, distributed system. • Can confidently take a project from blank page to delivery. You can describe key architectural, tooling and

technology decisions you’ve made and how you maintained the support of the team for these decisions. • We are keen advocates of Domain Driven Design, and you will be able to talk about modelling techniques that

you’ve used in the past to understand a complex domain such as TDD, BDD, event storming, CRC cards. • Designed an application of significant complexity using any object-oriented language (such as Node.js, Java,

Python or C#) and are keen to work with Node.js, Typescript, React.js. • Extensive experience designing and deploying systems in the cloud using AWS. We use serverless technologies so

previous experience would be beneficial. • Have experience of coaching and mentoring others and will be able to take part in coaching, pair programming,

code reviews and unblocking engineers. • Leading by example you will model the right behaviours and drive high-quality decision making within the team.

Working with the team, you will identify and set clear goals.

What you’ll get from us

Joining a high-growth tech company at an early stage is a rare opportunity, giving you the chance to work with the latest technologies on greenfield projects. As a technical leader you will play a key role in the technology, tooling and architectural decisions that we make.

At Cazoo, you will be an integral part of a team creating a highly visible and tangible product that’s seeking to disrupt and replace a painful process that almost everyone must contend with at some point in their life. More importantly, you will play a major role in it’s success.

Given the growth we expect to see over the next few years there will undoubtedly be opportunities to progress your career and take on extra leadership responsibility, if this is the route you’d like to go down.

Diversity & Inclusion are very important to us. We are passionate about building a culture where everyone feels welcomed, supported and most importantly, equal. We have a number of Employee Resource Groups which you can join to feel supported, but also to help in supporting others. We encourage all our employees to get involved in initiatives that will help drive our D&I strategy.

We have a great benefits package which will be combined with a generous equity scheme for all staff joining us now. This includes a company performance bonus, 5% matched pension, life assurance, private healthcare, critical illness cover, 25 days’ holiday, six months full-pay maternity leave and four weeks full-pay paternity leave. We have a culture of empowerment and autonomy and as part of this we are open to flexible working agreements, to ensure you’ve got the time for your other commitments in life.

Finally, you will be an integral part of a team creating a highly visible and tangible product that’s seeking to change and replace a painful process that almost everyone must contend with at some point in their life.

Interview details

The interview process will comprise of three remote video calls, each lasting around 60 minutes:

• Whiteboarding session – we will give you a requirement to whiteboard, discussing key decisions, trade-offs and potential risks.

• Technical Q&A – a competency focused interview discussing your previous technical experience. • Values-led interview – focused on our core values: Team Players, Fast Drivers, Customer Obsessed and Data

Driven.

Following this, we will give you a decision – and hopefully an offer – normally within 24 hours.

We are committed to ensuring accessibility in our interviews. From a physical disability standpoint, we have ensured our office is accessible but please do let us know if you have any issues or requests.

Similarly, we want to ensure neurodiverse candidates feel confident and comfortable with our interview process but appreciate there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to this. As such, please do let us know if you need any changes made to the interview process to accommodate yourself well.

All interviewers have had formal interview training, as well as training around unconscious bias.

Cloud Platform Engineering Manager

The Company

Our mission is to transform the car buying experience across the UK and Europe by providing better

selection, flexibility, transparency, convenience and peace of mind. Our aim is to make getting your

next car no different to ordering any other product online today, where consumers can simply and

seamlessly purchase, finance or subscribe to a car entirely online for delivery or collection in as little

as 72 hours.

Cazoo was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneur Alex Chesterman OBE, has a highly experienced

management team and is backed by some of the leading global technology investors.

The Role

We have implemented a cost-effective serverless architecture that scales to meet the demands of a

rapidly growing business. The Platform Engineering team runs our underlying infrastructural services,

they work closely with our engineers to advocate a DevOps mindset, and they provide the tools

required to continuously deploy and observe systems in production. They are instrumental in ensuring

our site can handle the volumes and spikes in traffic associated with being a high-profile brand. The

Platform Engineering team also helps to ensure the security of our systems, and provides a platform

which allows for secure-by-default design of services.

The Platform Engineering team is overseen by our Head of Platform Engineering, to ensure we

successfully scale the team’s capabilities, we are looking to hire an Engineering Manager for one of

our cloud engineering teams.

Today, the Platform Engineering team is split into four teams that focus on cloud engineering (2

teams), developer experience and web platform. In addition to this, we have plans to expand further,

starting with a brand new security team.

Across our system we make use of Event Driven Architecture, TypeScript, and serverless

technologies including Lambda functions and DynamoDB. Our platform team owns a range of tools

that allows our engineers to go faster, and more safely. We use Datadog, Honeycomb and Sentry for

monitoring and observability, and we use a mixture of Terraform and CloudFormation for

Infrastructure as Code.

We value and encourage the use of TDD, pair programming and collaborative modelling. Teams are

supported by agile delivery and quality coaches to enable them to master world class practices

through understanding the principles that lie behind them.

Key Responsibilities

● You’ll nurture a collective purpose within the team that aligns with the company’s wider vision,

ensure that the right work is being prioritised and the team understands the priorities.

● You’ll play a key role in spotting opportunities to further enhance our platform, contribute

ideas, and create an environment where your team can do the same. We believe that the best

engineering teams have the freedom to experiment and a commitment to continuous

improvement.

● Our teams are self-organising, so it will be up to you to encourage the use of processes that

allow the team to work productively, in a way that works best for them.

● It will be essential that you can build meaningful relationships with the platform engineers in

your team and ensure they are motivated. We also believe that diversity of perspectives

drives the best outcomes, and a key part of your role will be to facilitate healthy debate in a

team to improve decision making.

● Each employee should be given room to work autonomously, and you’ll ensure engineers

have an appropriately challenging workload and development plans that will continuously help

them to develop new skills through regular coaching, pair programming, workshops and

training.

● You will be accountable for timely and high-quality deliverables. We will measure your

success through your team’s frequent production of high-quality code and fast pace of

delivery to our customers.

What we need from you

● First and foremost, you will have a strong understanding of AWS, and a wide range of its

services, including IAM, networking and messaging services (e.g. SQS, EventBridge).

● As the role will centre heavily on improving and building tools for our infrastructure, you’ll

need experience with IaC and related tooling, such as Terraform or CloudFormation.

● You should have experience with modern practices like XP, Software Craftsmanship, Agile,

and CI/CD.

● You will need experience with either leading a team of engineers on a project or managing a

team. You should be able to talk about how you steered a project or initiative and how you

helped facilitate the team to deliver it effectively.

● You will need to be able to identify and set clear goals, lead by example, model behaviours,

and drive high-quality decision-making within the team.

● You should have experience in helping a team reach consensus on challenging decisions and

promoting a healthy level of debate and encourage dialogue between the engineers.

● You should have experience in spotting opportunities proactively to further enhance the

existing platform.

What you'll get from us

You will play an instrumental role in creating a best-in-class engineering team that values engineering

excellence. Over time you will continue to expand the size of your team and there will undoubtedly be

opportunities to progress your career and take on more responsibility across multiple teams.

Joining a high-growth company at this stage is a unique opportunity, giving you the chance to work

with the latest technologies with little legacy code to slow you down. You will be given complete

autonomy to push forward a fully serverless DevOps culture, using the latest technologies, including

AWS, Datadog, Honeycomb, Terraform and Typescript.

We will support your learning and development by planning this with you side-by-side – giving you on-

the-job training as well as the opportunity to attend conferences, workshops, and so on. We have a

personal development programme for management to ensure there is a clear plan in place to help you

upgrade your skills.

You will be joining a growing, self-organising team, and will have the freedom to decide the most

efficient way to work together and get the job done. Our teams and engineers do not work in silos,

and as such you will be given opportunities to use or develop skills outside of your core skill set too.

At Cazoo, you will be an integral part of a team creating a highly visible and tangible product that’s

seeking to change and replace a painful process that almost everyone must contend with at some

point in their life.

Last but not least, we foster a company culture that values its staff – as demonstrated by our

generous benefits package detailed above, as well as the chance to gain equity in a business with

outstanding prospects.

Interview details

We understand that your time is in demand and as such keep our interview process as quick and

painless as possible, outlining all timeframes in advance for you to plan around.

The interview will be conducted over 3 stages, each being a remote video call using Google Meet:

● A scenario-based exercise – demonstrating how you would handle common Engineering

Manager situations (90 mins)

● Technical knowledge, Q&A (60 mins)

● Culture and values interview (60 mins)

Following this, we will give you a decision – and hopefully an offer – normally within 24 hours.

We are committed to ensuring accessibility in our interviews. From a physical disability standpoint, we

have ensured our office is accessible but please do let us know if you have any issues or requests.

Similarly, we want to ensure neurodiverse candidates feel confident and comfortable with our

interview process but appreciate there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to this. As such, please do

let us know if you need any changes made to the interview process to accommodate yourself well.

All interviewers have had formal interview training, as well as training around unconscious bias.

Product Manager - International Expansion

Cazoo is preparing to launch its full proposition in Germany and across Europe giving customers the

option of purchasing, financing or subscribing to thousands of cars on its platform.

This is an exciting opportunity for a product person with a background in market localisation and a

passion for scaling technology to market. Successful candidates will have experience in program

management and working in highly collaborative environments across Product verticals, Design, UX,

Engineering, Data Privacy, Science, Operations, Marketing, Customer Service and more. They will

have an understanding of the global competitive landscape and emerging trends, partnering across

the organization to ensure global development is top of mind, and developing plans to drive customer

engagement and lifetime value for customers in every country Cazoo expands to. They will have

demonstrated experience program managing large, complex, high-visibility programs across the

organisation in a way that keeps everyone organised and accountable in the pursuit of global

expansion. The right prioritisation is key. They’ll be data-driven, naturally curious, and have the ability

to work collaboratively across functions.

Responsibilities

• Support the definition, development and delivery of best-in-class international experiences

and technologies.

• Translate the needs of each market into product requirements and user stories that

Engineering, Product Design, Product Analytics and other Product teams can rally around.

• Create the international roadmap and influence the roadmap of other Product teams for

market expansion.

• Work collaboratively across the organisation, owning and holding others accountable for

requirements to enter new markets.

• Partner with Product Design to develop systems that allow for seamless customer experience

in local markets.

• Partner with Engineering to develop technology and a playbook that creates scalable and

repeatable solutions and increases speed to market.

• Define specific requirements, evaluate implementation options, make recommendations and

drive prioritisation following a data-driven prioritisation approach.

• Act as a subject matter expert in international requirements and regulations.

• Manage and meet the needs of senior stakeholders, report on program status and post-

launch metrics, and escalate to drive decision-making.

Skills

• Proven experience in product development, working out what the right things to build are (as

opposed to being told what to build by someone else)

• Dual track (Discovery and Delivery) experience; at Cazoo we are big fans of Marty Cagan.

• Experience launching complex products/programs in a highly matrixed and fast paced

environment.

• Track record in working collaboratively, aligning teams and driving cross-functional decisions.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills with excellent stakeholder management skills

and demonstrated experience engaging and influencing senior executives.

• Proven experience in product development and internationalisation.

• Strategic thinking and practical planning skills.

• Analytical skills and significant experience using data to drive decision-making.

• Ability to identify and drive user research to better understand the needs and priorities of

Cazoo customers in any international segment.

• Able to deal with ambiguity, flexible regarding priorities and business needs.

About Cazoo

Our mission is to transform the car buying experience across the UK and Europe by providing better

selection, transparency, convenience and peace of mind. Our aim is to make getting your next car no

different to ordering any other product online today, where consumers can simply and seamlessly

purchase, finance or subscribe to a car entirely online for delivery or collection in as little as 72 hours.

Cazoo was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneur Alex Chesterman OBE, has a highly experienced

management team and is backed by some of the leading global technology investors.