Platform Engineering Manager (Cloud Foundations)

Our vision is to give everyone the belief they can make their move. We aim to make moving simpler, by giving everyone the best place to turn to and return to for access to the tools, expertise, trust, and belief to make it happen.

We’re home to the UK’s largest choice of properties and are the go-to destination for millions of people planning their next move, reading the latest industry news, or just browsing what’s on the market. 

The Role: Platform Engineering Manager (Cloud Foundations)

Location: London / Hybrid (2 days per week in office) 

Reporting to: Head of Technology Operations

The Role  

 Rightmove’s Cloud Foundations team delivers the secure, reliable, scalable and cost-optimised platform foundations used by hundreds of engineers and dozens of mission-critical services. As we ensure safe, low friction delivery of core services and operate at scale, the Engineering Manager will lead a team providing cloud platforms and infrastructure, cloud security, governance, automation, and operational excellence.  

This position blends people leadership, cloud operations, platform engineering, security governance, and FinOps. The successful candidate brings deep operational experience in product-led technology companies and understands how to run cloud foundations as a modern internal platform. 

Key Outcomes for This Role  

Strategy, Delivery and Execution  

• Through working with your team, key stakeholders, and the platform product manager, we provide a cloud platform strategy and roadmap that aligns to Rightmove business goals and our internal customer’s needs.  

• The team provides accurate estimates and realistic plans. 

• The platform roadmap, initiatives/projects, and OKRs are well managed and delivered in line with expectations. 

People Leadership & Team Development  

• Through coaching and mentoring engineers, setting clear, achievable development goals and provides actionable feedback, they improve skills, confidence, and impact. 

• Individual growth plans align with team objectives and organisational priorities. 

• Engineers are supported to designing and delivering scalable, secure, resilient platform services without micromanagement. 

• Achievements are recognised and rewarded, performance issues are addressed early and fairly.  

• There is an inclusive, psychologically safe environment; with leadership tailored to individual strengths and motivations. 

Platform Engineering, Operations & Reliability  

• Cloud platform and key services are reliable, incident detection and resolution are smooth due to proactive monitoring, well-maintained alerts/logs, and complete observability coverage. 

• Platform resilience and DR planning/testing strategy is defined and operational, working across the business with validated requirements and outcomes. 

• Backup, restore and resilience mechanisms are regularly tested, ensuring the platform can recover predictably. 

• Incident management processes are consistently followed, including timely post-incident reviews (PIRs) and completion of follow-up actions. 

• On-call is well staffed, sustainably operated, and fosters a healthy on-call culture. 

• Automation (AI-driven or traditional) delivers increased speed, reduced toil, and enhanced reliability. 

• Support requests are triaged and responded to promptly, with prioritisation based on upstream impact. 

• Capacity and cloud spend are effectively managed-no incidents caused by under-provisioning, and costs are controlled by avoiding unnecessary over-provisioning. 

• Finops culture is embedded with tooling and process across product development teams 

• Vendor relationships are managed, supplier due diligence is completed on time, contract costs and SLAs are negotiated as needed. 

• Continuous improvement culture is embedded: teams regularly evaluate performance, reliability and cost efficiency, feeding learnings back into the platform. 

Governance, Guardrails & Security  

• Infrastructure-as-Code, Policy-as-Code and automated guardrails accelerate delivery while strengthening governance and consistency across the platform. 

• Secure software delivery practices and policies are followed, vulnerabilities are managed within SLAs, Platform configuration standards are maintained (CIS Benchmarks). 

• Cloud security policies, governance standards and privacy controls consistent with predefined roles, least-privilege IAM patterns and role-based access practices are implemented and followed 

• The organisation meets regulatory, contractual and audit obligations, maintaining documentation, policies and process evidence for compliance reviews 

• Secure cloud configurations, WAF policies, bot protection, and cloud-native security tooling are maintained. 

• Architecture diagrams for network and key components are maintained for audit, security, knowledge sharing purposes. 

What you’ll bring   

• Proven experience in cloud operations and platform engineering management, overseeing cloud infrastructure and platforms, monitoring, reliability, and service delivery in production environments. 

• Previous hands-on experience running large cloud-based website environments with GKE, service mesh, load balancers, CDN/WAF, Kafka, Elasticsearch. 

• Strong understanding of cloud services including networking, compute, storage, containerisation, security and IAM. 

• Experience with IAC, python, Go, CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes, modern ops tooling and DevOps workflows. 

• Demonstrated experience implementing security controls, IAM policies, and cloud governance frameworks.  

• Familiarity with platform engineering concepts including developer platforms, reusable platform components and enabling internal product teams. 

• Experience improving operational processes and developing documented procedures (monitoring, DR, incident response, upgrade processes). 

• Strong leadership, team management, collaboration and communication skills, aligned with expectations for managing technical cloud teams.  
• Experience designing scalable, reliable cloud platform architectures, consistent with Cloud  

A note from your future manager - "You'll shape the cloud foundations that empower hundreds of engineers to build, deploy and innovate at scale."

Life at Rightmove

Despite our growth, we’ve remained a friendly, supportive place to work, with employee #1 still working here!  We’ve done this by placing the Rightmove Hows at the heart of everything we do. These are the essential values that reflect our culture, and include:

• We create value… by delivering results and building trust with partners and consumers.
• We think bigger… by acting with curiosity and setting bold aspirations.
• We care deeply… by being real, having fun, and valuing diversity.
• We move together… by being one team - internally collaborative, externally competitive.
• We make a difference… by focusing on delivering measurable impact.

We believe in careers that open doors and help our team develop by providing an open and inclusive work environment, offering ongoing   training opportunities, and supporting charity fundraising events. And with 89% of Rightmovers saying we’re a great place to work, we’re clearly doing something right! 

What we offer

• Cash plan for dental, optical and physio treatments.
• Private Medical Insurance, Pension and Life Insurance, Employee Assistance Plan.
• 27 days holiday plus two (paid) volunteering days a year to give back, and holiday buy schemes.
• Contributory stakeholder pension.
• Life assurance at 4x your basic salary to a spouse, family member or other nominated person in your life.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Paid leave for maternity, paternity, adoption & fertility.
• Travel Loans, Bike to Work scheme, Rental Deposit Loan.
• Charitable contributions through Payroll Giving and donation matching.
• Access deals and discounts on things like travel, electronics, fashion, gym memberships, cinema discounts and more.
• We offer hybrid working with a minimum of 2 days in the office. For our roles, such as Field or Home-based positions, different working arrangements apply - full details will be shared during the recruitment process.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, Rightmove will never discriminate based on age, disability, sex, race, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marriage / civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity or sexual orientation.  At Rightmove, we believe that a diverse and inclusive workforce leads to better innovation, productivity, and overall success. We are committed to creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all employees, regardless of their background or identity, to develop and promote a diverse culture that reflects the communities we serve.

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