Platform Engineering Manager (Cloud Foundations) in London

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

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.

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

Reporting to: Head of Technology Operations

Key Outcomes for This Role

• Platform Engineering, Operations & Reliability
• Backup, restore and resilience mechanisms are regularly tested, ensuring the platform can recover predictably.
• The platform is 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.
• Incident management processes are consistently followed, including timely post‑incident reviews (PIRs) and completion of follow‑up actions.
• Repeat incidents are rare due to effective root‑cause analysis and remediation.
• 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.
• Delivery and Execution
• Ensure the team is providing accurate estimates and realistic plans.
• Manage platform roadmap, initiatives/projects, and OKR delivery in line with expectations.
• Align cloud platform strategy and delivery plans with business goals, partnering with technical product manager, DX, DBA, security, SRE, and data teams.
• People Leadership & Team Development
• Coaches and mentors engineers to improve skills, confidence, and impact.
• Sets clear, achievable development goals and provides actionable feedback.
• Aligns individual growth plans with team objectives and organisational priorities.
• Guide engineers in designing scalable, secure, resilient platform services.
• Run effective 1:1s, set clear growth goals, recognise achievements and address performance early and fairly.
• Create an inclusive, psychologically safe environment; tailor leadership to individual strengths and motivations.

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.
• 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.

About Rightmove

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 88% 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.
• Hybrid working pattern with 2 days in the office.
• 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.

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.