Rightmove Tech Blog

This blog is adapted from a talk at Rightmove ProdDev Data Con co-presented by Caroline Snare, Content Design Manager and Chantal Slagmolen, Lead Product Designer. Building a design system is easy, relatively, but getting an organisation to actually use one isn’t. This is what three years of trying taught us – starting, for reasons that will become clear, with a colour. Teal has been around for roughly four thousand years, which is a long time for a colour nobody could quite agree on.

I didn’t start my career in tech. I studied advertising, fascinated by human behaviour and design. After graduating, I joined one of the Big Four media agencies in London, expecting to build a career in digital marketing. However, my interest in UX design and the psychology behind user decisions led me down a different path. That curiosity introduced me to Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), the discipline of structured experimentation, at the time, I had no idea what CRO even was.

I studied computer science and have spent my career in technical environments. From the start, I became familiar with what it feels like to be one of very few women in the room, navigating fast-paced discussions where confidence carries real weight. It was in those spaces that I began learning how important it is to ask questions, even when staying quiet feels safer. Entering the industry did not change that dynamic.

I didn’t start my career in tech. In fact, if you’d met me when I was filling out my university applications in Portugal, you probably wouldn’t have guessed I’d end up as a Head of Engineering in London. From MySpace to “real life” My first taste of tech wasn’t in a classroom or a computer lab. It was on MySpace. As a teenager, I spent hours hacking together my MySpace profile with copy-pasted HTML, changing colours and layouts without really knowing what I was doing.

FED Day 2025 brought together our frontend engineers for a full day of talks, workshops, and collaboration. Here are the highlights. Angel introduced Lighthouse Reporter – an internal tool that automates performance testing and tracks results over time. It allows running Google Lighthouse tests locally during development and in GitLab pipelines, storing results in dashboards.

It’s an inescapable fact that any technology company will eventually have to deal with legacy code. Systems naturally age over time, and often become more difficult to change or understand. They may have business logic becoming tangled with implementation details in a sprawling monolithic codebase, or may become stuck on older versions of languages or frameworks. Sometimes we can live with the risks for internal-only tools, but what about for external, revenue-generating applications?

Over the past 12 months, Rightmove’s IT team has been on a journey, one that is taking us from a traditional IT function focused on back office support, to a more proactive, product-enabled, user-focussed IT team. It’s been a year of bold moves, big ideas and ambitious OKRs. As we reflect on the past year, and look at how far we’ve come, something that’s glaringly obvious is how much learning has taken place.

About a month ago, fresh off the momentum of our Github Copilot hands-on workshop, my brilliant engineers took on the challenge of running an AI-assisted sprint. For me, as an engineering manager, it was a great opportunity to observe how AI might actually support and enhance our ways of working. I was well aware of the sceptics and the not-so-positive noise around AI “taking over humanity”, but I didn’t want that to be the reason we avoided trying something new.

Over the past few weeks, we ran two hands-on workshops with teams across Rightmove to explore how GitHub Copilot, specifically its Agent Mode, could support day-to-day engineering work. The idea was simple: take real Jira tickets, and solve them using only prompts, no keyboard coding allowed From back-end engineers and front-end developers to product managers, QA’s, BA’s and app analysts — everyone got involved.

This week, we brought all our Engineering Managers and Heads of Engineering together in London for a workshop focused on one big question: What does great engineering leadership look like at Rightmove? In the lead-up, we each took time to review our company HOWs and explore leadership principles from other organisations, including Amazon’s Leadership Principles and Google’s approach to leadership.