Platform Engineering Manager (Cloud Foundations)

Legal Counsel - 12 month FTC at Rightmove Greenhouse; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Rightmove is seeking a Platform Engineering Manager for Cloud Foundations in London with a hybrid work arrangement (2 days in office). You will lead a team responsible for cloud platforms, infrastructure, security governance, and FinOps, delivering reliable, scalable services at scale.

The role blends leadership with hands-on cloud operations, platform engineering, and governance, reporting to the Head of Technology Operations. Strong experience in product-led tech environments is desirable.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in cloud operations and platform engineering management.
• Strong hands-on experience with large cloud-based environments and modern ops tooling.
• Familiarity with security governance and FinOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Provide cloud platform strategy and roadmap aligned to business goals.
• Lead a team delivering reliable, secure, and scalable platform services.
• Oversee incident management, DR planning, and cost governance.
• Mentor engineers and foster an inclusive, high-performance culture.

Skills

Cloud operations

Platform leadership

GKE/Kubernetes

CI/CD

Security & IAM

DevOps tooling

Tools

GKE

Service mesh

Load balancers

CDN/WAF

Kafka

Elasticsearch

Job description

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,scalableand cost‑optimisedplatform foundations used by hundreds of engineers and dozens of mission‑critical services. As we ensure safe, low friction delivery of core services andoperateat scale, the Engineering Manager will lead a team providing cloudplatforms andinfrastructure, cloud security, governance, automation, and operational excellence.

This position blendspeopleleadership, 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 productmanager, weprovide acloudplatform strategy and roadmapthat aligns to Rightmove business goals and our internalcustomer’sneeds.
• Theteamprovidesaccurateestimates and realistic plans.
• Theplatform roadmap, initiatives/projects, and OKRs arewell managedand deliveredin 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 teamobjectivesand organisational priorities.
• Engineers are supportedtodesigning and delivering scalable, secure, resilient platform services without micromanagement.
• Achievements arerecognisedand rewarded, performance issues are addressed early and fairly.
• There is an inclusive, psychologically safeenvironment;with leadership tailored to individual strengths and motivations.

Platform Engineering, Operations & Reliability

• Cloudplatform and keyservices arereliable,incident detection and resolutionaresmooth due to proactive monitoring, well‑maintainedalerts/logs, and complete observability coverage.
• Platform resilience and DR planning/testing strategyisdefined and operational,working across the business with validated requirements and outcomes.
• Backup,restoreand resilience mechanisms are regularly tested, ensuring the platform can recover predictably.
• Incident management processes are consistently followed, includingtimelypost‑incident reviews (PIRs) and completion of follow‑up actions.
• On‑call is well staffed, sustainablyoperated, 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, withprioritisationbased 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.
• Finopsculture is embedded with tooling and process across product development teams
• Vendor relationships aremanaged,supplier due diligence is completed on time, contract costs and SLAs are negotiated as needed.
• Continuous improvement culture is embedded: teams regularly evaluate performance,reliabilityand cost efficiency, feeding learnings back into the platform.

Governance, Guardrails & Security

• Infrastructure‑as‑Code, Policy‑as‑Codeand automated guardrails accelerate delivery while strengthening governance and consistency across the platform.
• Secure software delivery practices and policies arefollowed,vulnerabilities are managed within SLAs, Platform configuration standardsaremaintained(CIS Benchmarks).
• Cloud security policies, governancestandardsand privacy controls consistent with predefined roles, least‑privilege IAM patterns and role-based access practicesare implemented and followed
• Theorganisationmeets regulatory, contractual and audit obligations,maintainingdocumentation,policiesand process evidence for compliance reviews
• Secure cloud configurations, WAF policies, bot protection, and cloud‑native security toolingaremaintained.
• Architecture diagrams for network and key components aremaintainedfor audit, security, knowledgesharing purposes.

What you’ll bring

• Proven experience in cloud operations and platform engineeringmanagement, overseeing cloud infrastructureand platforms, monitoring,reliability, and service delivery in production environments.
• Previoushands‑on experience running large cloud‑based website environmentswith GKE, service mesh, load balancers, CDN/WAF, Kafka, Elasticsearch.
• Strong understanding of cloudservicesincluding networking,compute, storage,containerisation,securityand 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