Principal Software Engineer (Platform)

Cazoo, is the ultimate destination for car enthusiasts and buyers alike! As a leader in the market, we pride ourselves on providing unparalleled search tools, expert car guides, insightful reviews, and a comprehensive vehicle price guide. Our mission is simple: to empower buyers to find their perfect car efficiently and with confidence, while also helping automotive retailers reach millions of eager buyers.

At Cazoo, you'll be part of a team that's revolutionising the way people buy and sell cars. If you're ready to drive your career forward in a dynamic, fast-paced environment, Cazoo is the place for you. Join us and be a part of shaping the future of automotive retail!

We are looking for Principal Software Engineer

Reports To: Director of Technology

Contract Type: Permanent

Location: Remote, UK based

About the role:

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the next generation of Cazoo's technology platform.

We're undertaking a significant modernisation of our existing Azure-based architecture, moving towards more scalable, cloud-native and event-driven services. This is an opportunity to influence how our core platform evolves, improve the experience of our engineering teams and build the foundations that support our customer-facing products.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, combining software engineering, architecture and platform strategy. You'll spend around half your time actively contributing to engineering delivery, while also helping set technical direction, mentoring engineers and driving initiatives across teams.

You'll be responsible for:

• Lead from the front as a hands-on engineer: writing production code, reviewing pull requests, pairing with engineers and taking your share of the hardest problems, so that your architectural direction is grounded in the realities of building and running our systems.

• Own the technical roadmap for our core platform capabilities: setting the direction for how our data is stored, enriched and served across the business, driving that roadmap through to delivery, and working with product and commercial stakeholders to sequence the work against business priorities.

• Lead the design and delivery of domain-oriented, event-driven services on Azure, and the retirement of the legacy systems they replace - making pragmatic trade-offs between perfection and technical debt to align with our priorities as a business..

• Ensure the systems we already run are kept to a high standard - treating operational readiness, monitoring and short-to-medium-term improvement as part of the day job, not something that waits for the next modernisation project.

• Contribute to and grow the wider engineering culture: raising the bar on coding standards, testing and best practices across our Java and TypeScript codebases, sharing knowledge openly, and helping engineers at every level build systems that are reliable, secure and scalable by default.

• Actively grow the engineers around you: mentoring and coaching across levels, giving direct and constructive feedback, and taking a full part in hiring — interviewing, running technical assessments, onboarding new joiners and helping shape how we assess and develop engineers.

• Lead good agile team outcomes ensuring engineering decisions are made which factor in technical debt, systems design, stability/reliability, monitoring/observability and business needs

• Be an active and collaborative member of our architecture community: contributing to and reviewing designs across domains, helping set and evolve shared architectural principles and standards, and working openly with other principals, architects and teams so that decisions are made together rather than in isolation.

• Dive deep into system and application performance and reliability issues: rapidly gathering context on systems you may not have touched before, forming a clear picture of the problem, and working with engineers across the organisation to turn that into an agreed action plan and see it through.

• Champion the effective use of AI-assisted development across the department: using agentic coding tools and LLMs to accelerate delivery, reviews, documentation and operational tasks; establishing guardrails, standards and evaluation practices so AI-generated changes meet the same quality bar as any other; and identifying where AI can improve our platform, data and product capabilities.

What we ideally looking for;

• A leader in backend and platform engineering with several years of experience designing, building and operating high-traffic, business-critical systems.

• A proven record of leading the modernisation of legacy systems into well-designed, cloud-native domains - including the difficult work of deprecating the old system safely.

• Experience designing event-driven architectures using solutions such as Azure Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus or Kafka.

• Hands-on, day-to-day experience using AI coding assistants and agentic tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor or GitHub Copilot) as part of your own workflow, with a clear point of view on where they add value, where they don't, and how to keep quality and security intact when using them.

• Strong data modelling skills across relational and non-relational stores — designing normalised schemas for complex, evolving domain data, document models where flexibility matters, caching layers, and materialised views, blob-backed read models and search indexes that serve high-traffic read paths - with a clear understanding of the consistency, ownership and lifecycle trade-offs between them

• Experience in the following technologies:

  • TypeScript and Node.js

  • Azure, including AKS, Azure Functions, storage and messaging services

  • Terraform

  • Kubernetes and Docker

  • Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry-style instrumentation

  • PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB (MongoDB API), Redis, Azure Blob Storage and Azure AI Search

  • Automated

• Previous experience with the following is a bonus:

  • Azure AI Search or other search platforms (Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)

  • API Management tools (Azure APIM, Apigee, Kong, Amazon API Gateway)

  • Azure devops and Github Actions

  • Automotive, marketplace or classifieds domains

  • Building AI-powered features or workflows: integrating LLM APIs, working with search and retrieval (RAG), or applying AI to data quality and enrichment problems.

  • Java 17+ and Spring Boot

Perks & Benefits

Here’s how we back you:

Financials 💰

• We more than match your commitment to your pension, so when you contribute 6% , we put in 9%, taking your total up to 15% of your base salary.

• Quarterly value-led awards with generous cash prizes.

• Referral Bonus: Recommend a colleague, get £2,000.

Work-Life 🏖️

• 25 days (plus bank holidays)

• Family Enhanced leave after 6 months of service:

• Maternity/Pregnant Parent Leave: 20 weeks at 100% pay,.

• Paternity/Non-birth Parent Leave: 12 weeks at 100% pay.

• Volunteer Days: We offer 2 volunteer days a year so you can help out wherever mat