Principal Engineer (Backend)

Location: London office / Hybrid (2 days per week in the office) Reporting to: Head of Engineering Domain: Consumer

• The Role… Rightmove's consumer product-domain builds what most people picture when they think of Rightmove. Property search, listing pages, saved searches, maps, alerts, valuations. It gets an enormous amount of traffic, it's used at one of the most stressful moments in people's lives, and around 60 engineers work across it every day.
• We're hiring a Principal Engineer into this domain. This is a senior, cross-domain role for someone who wants to drive impact across multiple teams, deepen our architectural thinking, and help us raise the bar on technical execution, product delivery, and long-term platform health.
• Your technical grounding is in Java and Spring Boot, and you're genuinely expert there. But you think and operate well beyond your specialism: across front-end, mobile, data, infrastructure, and delivery. You're comfortable challenging assumptions at any layer of the stack, and you connect technical decisions to real user and business outcomes without needing to be prompted.
• You’ll bring a mix of deep technical expertise, strong product instincts, and collaborative leadership, acting as a trusted partner to engineering managers, product leads, and domain heads.
• ✍️Head to our tech blog to find out more about our engineering culture!
• What you'll be doing…
• Engineering & Architecture Leadership
• Lead the design of systems that are scalable, resilient, and fit for purpose, particularly where complexity cuts across team boundaries.
• Shape the architectural direction of the consumer domain in alignment with our strategic goals.
• Identify areas where we can increase reuse, improve performance, or make smarter technology decisions.
• Delivery Impact
• Partner with Engineering and Product Managers to guide scoping, sequencing, and risk mitigation for large, high-value initiatives.
• Unblock teams by spotting better ways forward, helping shift delivery patterns or simplifying complexity.
• Influence outcomes through strong product awareness and a focus on business and user value.
• Standards & Practices