Platform Engineering Manager (Cloud Foundations)

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 - "This role will kep our workplace running smoothly, day in, and day out. By bringing together facilites, workplace experience and community, with a dose of excellence and fun, it enables every Rightmover to focus on doing their best work."