How to Apply to Rightmove

14 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 18 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • The application gateway is Greenhouse on the EU instance at job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/rightmovecareers, despite some legacy registry data that points to BambooHR. There is no other supported route in.
  • London (33 Soho Square) is the engineering, product, design and data hub. Milton Keynes (Caldecotte Lake Drive) houses the commercial, customer experience and infrastructure operations. Hybrid is two days a week in office for most central roles.
  • The tech stack is JVM-heavy: Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Couchbase, Gradle, Hibernate, Docker, deployed primarily on AWS. Mobile is Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS).
  • Rejecting REA Group's roughly GBP 6.1 billion approach in September 2024 was a defining moment. The company is now hiring aggressively into AI search, data, platform engineering and the rentals product to deliver against the standalone story it pitched to shareholders.
  • The Rightmove Hows (create value, think bigger, care deeply, move together, make a difference) are interview-evaluated, not poster-decoration. Bring a quantified story for each.
  • Expect four to five rounds: recruiter screen, hiring manager, technical or functional assessment, values/Hows round, and for senior roles a leadership conversation with a director or VP.
  • Salary bands are competitive for the UK market but rarely top of band. The total package strength is in stability, generous benefits (private medical for you and family, 27 days holiday, life assurance at 4x base, share-save scheme) and equity participation in a profitable FTSE 100 business.
  • The company values long tenure and demonstrated commitment. Job-hopping CVs face more scrutiny than at typical scale-ups; be ready to explain short stints honestly and frame your motivation for joining as a multi-year arc.
  • AI-assistance disclosure is taken seriously. The application form asks you to confirm that AI-drafted answers reflect your own experience; interviews will probe authenticity, and getting caught out is fatal.
  • Generic property-tech enthusiasm is not enough. Use the product, form opinions, follow the medium.com/rightmove-engineering tech blog, and come prepared to discuss the agent versus consumer trade-off with the same fluency you would bring to your own technical specialism.

About Rightmove

Rightmove plc is the UK's dominant property portal and one of the country's most-visited consumer websites. Launched in March 2000 by the country's four largest estate-agency groups (Countrywide, Connells, Halifax Property Services and Royal & Sun Alliance), the company set out to digitise an industry that still revolved around printed listings in high-street windows and the Saturday property supplement. Twenty-five years later it has effectively cornered that market: more than 19,000 estate-agency branches and new-homes developers pay to advertise on the platform, and home movers spend over a billion minutes on the site each month across roughly 150 million monthly visits. By any reasonable definition, Rightmove is a near-monopoly in UK property search, with rivals Zoopla and OnTheMarket fighting for what is left. That dominance translates to extraordinary unit economics for a roughly 770-person business. Rightmove generated revenue of approximately GBP 408 million in its most recent full year and operating margins north of 70 percent, making it one of the most profitable companies on the FTSE 100 by any margin metric you care to pick. Headed by chief executive Johan Svanstrom, an Expedia and Hotels.com veteran who took the role in March 2022, the company has used that cash machine to expand into adjacent revenue lines: a fast-growing rentals platform, mortgage lead generation, commercial property listings, and a developing 'Lead to Keys' suite that aims to monetise more of the home-moving journey beyond the initial property search. The headline corporate event of recent years was the takeover saga with REA Group. Between August and September 2024 Australia's REA Group, majority-owned by News Corp, made four successive cash-and-share approaches culminating in a bid that valued Rightmove at roughly GBP 6.1 billion. Rightmove's board rejected every offer as 'materially undervaluing' the business, and on 30 September 2024 REA walked away under the UK Takeover Code's put-up-or-shut-up deadline. The episode was a pivotal moment for staff: it confirmed both that the equity story is far from priced in by the public market and that the company intends to remain independent and ambitious. Hiring has accelerated against that backdrop, with particular emphasis on data, AI search, mobile applications and platform engineering. For candidates, the key cultural signal is what the company calls the 'Rightmove Hows': create value, think bigger, care deeply, move together, make a difference. These aren't recruiter-deck slogans alone; they show up in interview rubrics, performance reviews and town-hall language. Pair that with the operational reality (employee number one still works there, 88 percent of staff describe it as a great place to work, ten-year tenures earn you a literal garden gnome) and you get the picture: a stable, profitable, slightly understated British technology company that is suddenly being asked to behave more like a growth-stage scale-up. Knowing how to navigate that tension is the single most useful thing you can bring to a Rightmove interview.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Find live roles on the official careers site at rightmove

    Find live roles on the official careers site at rightmove.co.uk/careers, then click through to the live job board hosted on Greenhouse at job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/rightmovecareers. As of writing the board lists about 18+ open roles across engineering, data, product, design, sales, marketing and customer experience.

  2. 2
    Choose roles that genuinely match your location pattern

    Choose roles that genuinely match your location pattern. Engineering, product, design and data roles are predominantly London-based out of 33 Soho Square (W1D 3QU) on a hybrid pattern of 2 days per week in office. Commercial, customer experience, ERP/IT and infrastructure leadership often run out of Building 2, Caldecotte Lake Drive in Milton Keynes. Estate-agency sales roles are field-based across UK regions.

  3. 3
    Apply via Greenhouse using the 'Apply' button on the role page

    Apply via Greenhouse using the 'Apply' button on the role page. You can autofill from MyGreenhouse if you have an existing profile, otherwise upload a CV (PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT or RTF) and an optional cover letter. The form requires first/last name, email, phone with country code, LinkedIn URL, desired salary and current notice period.

  4. 4
    Answer the role-specific screening questions carefully

    Answer the role-specific screening questions carefully. Rightmove asks an explicit AI-use disclosure question on every application: you must confirm that while you may use AI tools to help draft answers, your responses reflect your own experience and judgment. Treat this as binding; recruiters and hiring managers will probe answer authenticity at interview.

  5. 5
    Complete the optional candidate demographic questionnaire if you are comfortable

    Complete the optional candidate demographic questionnaire if you are comfortable doing so. It does not affect screening decisions and is used for diversity reporting; the company is publicly committed to diverse representation and this data informs that programme.

  6. 6
    Expect a recruiter screen within roughly one to two weeks of application for act

    Expect a recruiter screen within roughly one to two weeks of application for active roles. The Talent Acquisition team is structured by function (Product Development, Commercial, etc.) and the partner for your function will run the initial 30-minute call covering motivation, salary, notice and a high-level skills check.

  7. 7
    Move into a hiring-manager interview, usually 45 to 60 minutes, focused on your

    Move into a hiring-manager interview, usually 45 to 60 minutes, focused on your past experience mapped against the job description's 'What you will do' and 'Who you are' sections. Have specific stories ready that match the bullet points line by line.

  8. 8
    For technical roles, expect a take-home or live coding exercise plus a system-de

    For technical roles, expect a take-home or live coding exercise plus a system-design or technical-deep-dive round. Backend exercises are typically Java/Spring-flavoured but written to allow language flexibility on take-home tasks. Mobile roles run language-specific (Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS).

  9. 9
    Attend a final-stage panel that combines values/behavioural assessment against t

    Attend a final-stage panel that combines values/behavioural assessment against the Rightmove Hows with a cross-functional collaboration discussion. Senior or principal roles include a leadership round with a director or VP, and sometimes a meeting with the relevant member of the executive committee.

  10. 10
    Receive a verbal offer from Talent Acquisition followed by a written contract wi

    Receive a verbal offer from Talent Acquisition followed by a written contract within a few days. UK right-to-work checks, two professional references and a basic background check are standard before start date. Notice periods of one to three months are typical for the candidates Rightmove targets, and the team is generally accommodating on a delayed start.

Resume Tips for Rightmove

recommended

Lead with measurable impact in pounds, percentages or scale

Lead with measurable impact in pounds, percentages or scale. Rightmove is a profit-and-loss-driven business with one of the FTSE 100's highest operating margins; recruiters and hiring managers respond to numbers far more than to job-description recitation. 'Reduced p95 search latency from 480ms to 95ms across 12M monthly users' beats 'optimised search performance' every time.

recommended

For engineering roles, name the exact technologies on the live job ad

For engineering roles, name the exact technologies on the live job ad. Backend roles want explicit experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Couchbase, Gradle, Hibernate and Docker. Android roles want Kotlin, Jetpack Compose and modern Android architecture. Generic 'JVM ecosystem' phrasing reads as evasion.

recommended

Surface AWS depth if you have it

Surface AWS depth if you have it. Rightmove runs heavily on AWS and platform/SRE roles routinely list cloud foundations, observability and infrastructure-as-code as required. Mention specific services (EKS, MSK, OpenSearch, Lambda, Terraform) rather than the catch-all 'AWS experience'.

recommended

For data roles, distinguish between analytics engineering (dbt, warehouse modell

For data roles, distinguish between analytics engineering (dbt, warehouse modelling, BI), data engineering (pipelines, streaming, lake-house) and ML engineering (model training, deployment, MLOps). The team has separate squads for each and applying to the wrong one is a common rejection reason.

recommended

If you are applying for Estate Agency or Commercial sales roles, lead with quota

If you are applying for Estate Agency or Commercial sales roles, lead with quota attainment and territory size. 'Achieved 118% of GBP 1.4M annual quota across 47 accounts in East Midlands' is the format that earns a screen. Field-based candidates should also flag UK driving licence and willingness to travel within the named postcode range.

recommended

Match your CV vocabulary to the 'Rightmove Hows' (create value, think bigger, ca

Match your CV vocabulary to the 'Rightmove Hows' (create value, think bigger, care deeply, move together, make a difference). Subtle alignment in your accomplishments section, not slavish repetition, signals cultural fit and improves both ATS keyword matching and recruiter scan-readability.

recommended

Keep the document Greenhouse-friendly: a clean two-page PDF, single column, Aria

Keep the document Greenhouse-friendly: a clean two-page PDF, single column, Arial or Calibri 10-11pt body, standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills). Greenhouse parses tables, multi-column layouts and graphical resumes poorly, and Rightmove recruiters review the parsed text not the rendered file.

recommended

If you have UK property, prop-tech or marketplace experience (Zoopla, OnTheMarke

If you have UK property, prop-tech or marketplace experience (Zoopla, OnTheMarket, Auto Trader, Trainline, Just Eat, Rightmove competitors generally), put it front and centre. Familiarity with two-sided marketplace dynamics, listing inventory, lead generation and consumer-trust mechanics is a meaningful shortcut to credibility.

recommended

Include an explicit 'Authorisation' line stating UK right to work without sponso

Include an explicit 'Authorisation' line stating UK right to work without sponsorship if applicable. Rightmove sponsors visas selectively for senior or specialist engineering hires but the default expectation is existing UK working rights, and ambiguity on this point delays screening.

recommended

Add a one-line note about location flexibility (e

Add a one-line note about location flexibility (e.g. 'Based London, willing to attend Soho Square office Tuesday-Thursday') for hybrid roles. Two days per week in office is non-negotiable for most London product-development positions and pretending otherwise gets discovered fast.

ATS System: Greenhouse (EU instance)

Rightmove uses Greenhouse Recruiting on the EU domain, accessible at job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/rightmovecareers. The EU instance is the standard choice for UK-headquartered companies that need to keep candidate personal data within the European Economic Area for UK GDPR compliance. Greenhouse is the same applicant tracking system used by most well-funded technology companies (Stripe, Airbnb, HubSpot, OpenAI), so a CV optimised for Greenhouse parsing will travel well across the wider tech-job market. The system parses uploaded CV files into structured fields (work history, education, skills), routes applications through a defined recruiting workflow with stages for sourcing, screen, interview and offer, captures structured scorecards from interviewers, and supports anonymous demographic data collection separate from the main application. Rightmove publishes the demographic question set as optional and makes clear it does not influence selection.

  • Submit a single PDF that contains real, machine-readable text. Image-based PDFs (scans, designed-as-image CVs from Canva or InDesign without an embedded text layer) parse to garbage in Greenhouse and your application will be evaluated only by recruiters who manually open the file.
  • Use standard section headings: 'Work Experience' or 'Experience', 'Education', 'Skills', 'Projects'. Greenhouse's parser is keyed to these labels and will misclassify content under creative headings ('My Journey', 'What I Bring').
  • Spell out abbreviations on first use, especially for tech stacks (e.g. 'Amazon Web Services (AWS)', 'Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)'). Greenhouse keyword matching is literal and recruiters search both abbreviated and expanded forms.
  • Fill every required form field including phone with the correct country code (+44 for UK). Greenhouse rejects submissions with missing required fields silently in some flows and the application never reaches the recruiter.
  • Do not skip the role-specific screening questions assuming they are optional. They are routed into the candidate scorecard and a blank or single-word answer to 'What is your desired salary for this role?' or 'Do you have B2B sales experience?' is treated as a soft rejection signal.
  • If you are reapplying after a previous rejection, use the same email address. Greenhouse links applications across roles by email and recruiters can see your full history; trying to obscure a prior rejection by switching email looks evasive and is easy to spot at reference-check time.

Interview Culture

Rightmove's interview culture is best described as British-tech professional with an unusually heavy emphasis on values and craft.

The process avoids both Silicon Valley showmanship (no whiteboard humiliation, no take-home assignments designed to consume a full weekend) and the more rigid checkbox style common at FTSE 100 incumbents. Conversations are structured but conversational, panels are small (typically two to three people), and interviewers are encouraged to share their own thinking openly rather than holding the candidate at arm's length. The overall flow is consistent across functions: recruiter screen, hiring-manager interview, technical or functional skills assessment, and a final values/leadership round. For engineering, the technical assessment usually combines a short take-home or paired-coding exercise with a system-design discussion grounded in real Rightmove problems (search at scale, listing-data ingestion, mobile performance, lead-routing latency). Interviewers are reasonable about what is achievable in the time given and care more about how you reason through trade-offs than about producing a perfect solution. The tech blog at medium.com/rightmove-engineering is essentially required reading; specific posts on Elasticsearch, Kafka and the consumer apps stack come up frequently in conversation. For product, design and data roles, expect a portfolio walk-through or case study followed by a working session with a cross-functional partner. Designers should bring a portfolio that shows process, not just final screens, and be prepared to discuss two-sided marketplace constraints (the agent paying the listing fee versus the consumer using the product). Product managers are evaluated against a metrics-driven framework: how do you size opportunities, how do you decide what not to build, how do you trade off agent revenue against consumer experience, how do you measure success. Data candidates typically face a SQL exercise plus a structured analytics or modelling discussion grounded in property-domain examples. Commercial and estate-agency sales rounds are quite different. Expect a structured behavioural interview against a competency framework (new business acquisition, account management, objection handling, commercial acumen), often followed by a role-play in which you sell the Rightmove proposition to a hesitant high-street estate agent. Field-based candidates are interviewed by their prospective Sales Manager and a regional Director, and the panel will probe territory knowledge in detail; candidates who cannot name the major independent agents in the postcodes they would cover are usually filtered out at this stage. The values round, sometimes called the 'Hows interview', deserves specific preparation. Interviewers will ask for concrete examples that map to each of the five Rightmove Hows: a time you created measurable value for an end user, a time you thought bigger than the brief asked, a time you cared deeply about a colleague or customer, a time you put team success above personal credit, a time you delivered measurable impact rather than activity. Generic STAR-format answers without quantified outcomes underperform; the company is unusually disciplined about distinguishing motion from progress. Feedback timelines are reasonable by UK standards: typically 48 to 72 hours between rounds, with a final decision within a week of the last interview. Talent Acquisition is the single point of contact throughout and will share structured feedback even on rejected applications, which is a meaningful courtesy and worth taking seriously if you intend to reapply.

What Rightmove Looks For

  • Demonstrable ownership of outcomes, not activities. The Rightmove Hows are written deliberately to push candidates away from describing what they did and toward describing what changed because they did it. Quantified business or user impact wins.
  • Genuine interest in the UK property market, not just generic prop-tech enthusiasm. Candidates who have looked at the product in detail, formed views about specific features, and can articulate the agent versus consumer trade-off consistently outperform stronger candidates who treat Rightmove as 'just another web property'.
  • Engineering craft over framework name-dropping. Interviewers care more about how you reason about scaling, observability, testing, deployment and on-call than about your exact framework choices. Strong opinions held loosely, with concrete production examples to back them up.
  • Comfort with autonomous cross-functional teams. Rightmove organises product development into squads with embedded design, product, engineering and QA. Candidates with experience working closely with non-engineering peers (and pushing back constructively when needed) are explicitly preferred over solo specialists.
  • Pragmatic AI literacy. With Machine Learning Engineer and AI Search product roles open and an entire 'AI Enablement' platform team being built, the company expects candidates to have informed views on how generative and traditional ML fit a profitable, regulated consumer marketplace, without falling into either hype or dismissiveness.
  • Long-term thinking. The company values tenure (a literal garden gnome at ten years, employee number one still in role) and looks for candidates who are joining for the next five-year arc rather than the next promotion-driven hop. Job-tenure patterns on your CV are noticed.
  • Customer-obsession that includes the agent customer, not just the consumer. Estate agents pay the bills; engineers and product managers who design only for home movers and treat agent-side tooling as an afterthought struggle in interviews. Demonstrating that you understand both sides of the marketplace is a clear differentiator.
  • Direct, low-ego communication style. Interviewers are themselves understated and dislike candidates who oversell, name-drop or talk over the panel. British-business norms apply: confidence backed by evidence, comfort admitting what you do not know, willingness to disagree politely with the panel when warranted.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does Rightmove use, and is the BambooHR reference correct?
Rightmove uses Greenhouse on the EU instance, hosted at job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/rightmovecareers. Some third-party data sources (including older job-aggregator registries) list BambooHR; that is incorrect for the current 2026 hiring pipeline. The careers site at rightmove.co.uk/careers links directly out to the Greenhouse board, and applications are processed entirely within Greenhouse's EU-hosted infrastructure for UK GDPR compliance.
Where is Rightmove actually based, London or Milton Keynes?
Both. Rightmove plc, the listed parent, is registered at 33 Soho Square, London W1D 3QU, which is the principal office for product, engineering, design, data and the executive team. Rightmove Group Ltd, the operating company, is based at Building 2, Caldecotte Lake Drive in Milton Keynes, which houses commercial, customer experience and the bulk of operational headcount. The company was historically Milton Keynes-anchored and remains a dual-site organisation; pick the location that matches the role you are applying for, not the one closer to home.
Is Rightmove still independent after the REA Group bid?
Yes. Australia's REA Group, majority-owned by News Corp, made four cash-and-share approaches between August and September 2024, with the final bid valuing Rightmove at approximately GBP 6.1 billion. Rightmove's board rejected each approach as undervaluing the business, and on 30 September 2024 REA walked away under the UK Takeover Code's twenty-eight-day put-up-or-shut-up rule. Rightmove remains a standalone FTSE 100 company under chief executive Johan Svanstrom and there is no current public takeover process.
What is the typical interview process for an engineering role at Rightmove?
Four to five rounds: a 30-minute recruiter screen with the Talent Acquisition Partner for Product Development, a 45-60 minute hiring-manager conversation, a technical assessment combining either a take-home exercise or paired-coding session with a system-design discussion grounded in real Rightmove problems, a values/Hows interview, and for senior or principal roles a final leadership round with a Director or VP. Total elapsed time from application to offer is typically three to five weeks.
What technologies will I be working with as a backend engineer?
Live job ads explicitly call for Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Couchbase, SQL, Gradle, Hibernate and Docker, deployed primarily on AWS. The platform engineering teams build on this with cloud-foundations services (EKS, MSK, OpenSearch and similar managed AWS primitives), and there is a dedicated AI Enablement platform team being built out as of 2026. Mobile roles use Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS; data roles use a modern lakehouse stack with dbt, warehouse modelling and Python-based ML pipelines.
Does Rightmove sponsor UK work visas?
Selectively. The default expectation is that candidates already have the right to work in the UK without sponsorship. Rightmove holds a sponsor licence and will sponsor for genuinely senior or hard-to-fill engineering, data and product roles where the candidate is materially differentiated, but they do not sponsor for entry-level, sales or general operations positions. State your right-to-work status clearly in your application; ambiguity delays screening.
What is the hybrid working pattern?
Two days per week in office for most central London and Milton Keynes roles, with the specific days chosen by your team rather than mandated company-wide. Field-based estate-agency and commercial roles are based from home and travel within their assigned territory, with periodic meetings at Milton Keynes. Fully remote arrangements are uncommon and typically limited to a small number of specialist senior roles that pre-date the current return-to-office norm.
How does pay at Rightmove compare to other UK tech employers?
Competitive against UK-headquartered peers (Sky, the BBC, Auto Trader, Trainline, Just Eat) but generally below US-based scale-ups operating in London (Stripe, Datadog, Snowflake, Palantir) for engineering and product roles. The total package is strengthened materially by FTSE 100 benefits: private medical for you and immediate family, 27 days holiday plus bank holidays, life assurance at 4x base salary, contributory pension, share-save scheme, and access to the executive long-term incentive plan at senior levels. For commercial roles, on-target earnings with uncapped commission can be very strong; the published GBP 45-55K basic plus GBP 15K uncapped OTE for an Account Manager role is typical.
What does the 'Rightmove Hows' interview actually look like?
It is a behavioural interview structured around five values: create value, think bigger, care deeply, move together, make a difference. Interviewers will ask for a specific real-world example for each, evaluated against a structured scorecard. The strongest answers are quantified (specific business or user outcomes), self-aware (what did you learn, what would you do differently), and balanced (acknowledging where colleagues contributed). Generic STAR-format answers that describe activity without measurable outcomes are the most common failure mode.
Why is Rightmove hiring so heavily into AI and data right now?
Two reasons. First, the standalone strategy the board pitched to shareholders when rejecting REA Group requires demonstrable growth in adjacent revenue lines (rentals, mortgages, commercial property, lead-to-keys home services) and in product depth (AI search, personalisation, agent-side analytics). Second, generative AI is transforming consumer expectations of property search, and Rightmove cannot afford to cede that frontier to better-resourced foreign competitors or generalist search engines. As of writing the company has open roles for Machine Learning Engineer, Product Manager AI Search, Engineering Manager AI Enablement, and Technical Product Manager AI Enablement, all in London.
Is the tenure culture really as long as the website suggests?
Yes. The company genuinely retains employee number one from the year 2000 launch, awards a personalised garden gnome at ten years of service, and reports an internal employee-survey 'great place to work' score of 88 percent. Median tenure is materially longer than at typical UK technology employers, and in interviews this shows up as a preference for candidates whose CV implies a multi-year commitment. If your background is short-stint by necessity (consulting, contract work, two acquisitions in three years) be ready with an honest narrative; the company does not penalise legitimate reasons but does penalise visible job-hopping.
Can I apply to multiple roles at the same time?
Yes, and the Greenhouse system tracks all your applications under a single email address. Talent Acquisition will sometimes redirect you to a more suitable role if you have applied to one that isn't the right fit; what they will not do is consider you for roles you have not actively applied to. If you are open to multiple functions (for example a senior product role or a senior product-design role at the same level) submit separate applications and tailor each CV to the specific job description.

Open Positions

Rightmove currently has 18 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 18 open positions at Rightmove

Related Resources

Related Articles

Sources

  1. Rightmove Careers - Official careers site —
  2. Rightmove jobs on Greenhouse (EU instance) —
  3. Rightmove Careers - Culture and benefits —
  4. Rightmove Careers - How we hire —
  5. Software Engineer (Backend) job posting - Rightmove on Greenhouse —
  6. Rightmove plc Investor Relations - corporate information —
  7. REA Group statement: REA does not intend to make an offer for Rightmove —
  8. Rightmove Engineering tech blog —