Engineering Manager · London, UK

Engineering leadership
with technical depth

5 years leading engineering teams, 12 years as a hands-on engineer. I bridge deep technical knowledge with people leadership and delivery discipline — across fintech, proptech, SaaS and enterprise at scale.

London, UK Engineering Manager · CTO GCP · AWS · AI Products
Get in touch LinkedIn
Worked at
Rightmove Roleshare Moonpig Wonga SEB
Ahmad Mousavi
Ahmad Mousavi
0 Years engineering
0 Engineers led
0 Engineers hired
0 % cloud cost cut
0 × YoY growth

About

How I think about leadership

I started as a software engineer and spent 12 years writing production code before stepping into leadership. That background shapes everything — I lead with context, not just authority, and I stay close enough to the technical work to ask the right questions.

"The best engineering cultures I've been part of had one thing in common: people were more afraid of hiding a problem than raising one. Everything else — the velocity, the quality, the retention — followed from that."
— Ahmad Mousavi

Books that shaped how I lead

The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier
The clearest map of the engineering leadership ladder I've found.
An Elegant Puzzle
Will Larson
Systems thinking applied to people and organisations.
Turn the Ship Around!
David Marquet
Leadership as distributing control, not holding it.
Radical Candor
Kim Scott
Care personally, challenge directly.
The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain de Botton
Good thinking predates every management framework by millennia.

Career

Professional Experience

From hands-on engineering in fintech and healthcare to leading multi-team organisations through legacy modernisation, cloud migration, and AI product delivery.

Rightmove — Engineering Manager
Aug 2023 – Present
London & Milton Keynes, UK
  • Led two teams of 14 engineers in Milton Keynes, then moved to London to lead two further teams of 16 engineers where a technically strong EM was needed to stabilise delivery and modernise a complex legacy estate.
  • Hired 10 engineers, promoted 7, and managed 3 underperformance cases through clear goals, structured coaching and feedback — rebuilding team ownership and delivery cadence throughout.
  • Led Rightmove's first customer-facing AI property-performance co-pilot, aligning product, data and engineering on MVP scope, LLM integration, rollout controls and H2 2026 roadmap.
  • Reduced account-manager sales deck preparation from 45 minutes to 4 minutes via a BigQuery-integrated enablement platform; scoped a multi-year legacy rewrite into a phased roadmap delivering value 8 months earlier than planned.
  • Integrated the acquired HomeViews platform into Rightmove engineering standards across 30+ legacy services — covering team operating model, supplier risk for 34 vendors, data-retention alignment, and SSDLC.
  • Coordinated migration of 18+ microservices from on-premise infrastructure to GCP; modernised 32 VM-based HomeViews applications towards GKE and managed databases.
  • Formed a new team from scratch and retired a critical 25-year-old commercial legacy solution, removing a significant maintenance burden.
  • Led Secure SDLC adoption across 24 engineering teams and improved delivery predictability through flow metrics, Jira dashboards, lead/cycle-time measures and release governance.
AI ProductsGCP / GKELegacy ModernisationSecure SDLCPeople Leadership
Roleshare — Chief Technology Officer
Jan 2022 – Aug 2023
London, UK · also fractional 2019–2022
  • Built and led the full technology function — engineering, security, analytics and remote delivery partners — with board-level reporting and technical strategy ownership.
  • Grew the platform from zero to 12,000 users with 8× YoY growth, converting enterprise pilots at J.P. Morgan and BP into recurring revenue.
  • Hired 9 engineers across permanent and contract roles, and managed a remote development agency of 6 engineers.
  • Achieved ISO 27001 certification, ran two annual penetration tests, and prepared foundations for SOC 2 and GDPR readiness.
  • Reduced cloud costs by 65% through architecture simplification across AWS and GCP services.
  • Designed a near real-time data platform and commercial dashboards giving the business its first reliable view of product usage, funnel performance and operational health.
CTOISO 27001AWS / GCP0 → 1Enterprise Sales
Moonpig — Senior Software & Data Engineer
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022
London, UK
  • Represented the data platform team on the Principal Engineering Steering Group — standardising data contracts, GDPR processes and acquired-business onboarding.
  • Architected a multi-region, cross-account AWS event-streaming platform ingesting millions of SNS messages into Snowflake.
  • Built Moonpig's first machine-learning pipeline for batch inference and contributed to live inference design.
AWSSnowflakeML PipelinesSNS / SQS
Wonga — Senior Software Engineer
Mar 2017 – Jan 2019
London, UK
  • Built a modern loan management platform using event-driven microservices, NServiceBus and RabbitMQ.
  • Designed asynchronous cash-out services integrating with RBS and Modulr through queues, webhooks and APIs; improved CI/CD with Jenkins and Octopus.
MicroservicesNServiceBusRabbitMQFintech
Earlier — SEB & KHCC
Feb 2009 – Feb 2017
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • Senior Software Engineer and Technical Coordinator at SEB (2014–2017) — enterprise delivery, stakeholder management and implementation quality across large-scale projects.
  • Software Engineer at KHCC (2009–2014) — healthcare and enterprise software, building a foundation in full-stack engineering, databases and delivery practices.
EnterpriseHealthcareTechnical Coordination

Technical Skills

What I work with

Deep hands-on experience across the full stack — from infrastructure and data to security, AI and delivery practices. I stay technical enough to earn trust and ask the right questions.

Languages & Frameworks
JavaSpring BootC#.NETPythonFlaskSQLLaravel / PHPTerraform
Architecture & Delivery
DDDHexagonal Arch.Event-drivenKafkaRabbitMQNServiceBusAPI DesignCI/CDGitHubJenkins
Cloud, Data & Observability
GCPAWSBigQuerySnowflakeVerticaAirflowKinesisLambdaSageMakerKibanaNew RelicDORA / MTTR
Security, Governance & AI
Secure SDLCISO 27001SOC 2GDPR / DPIAThreat ModellingSAST / DASTRAGPrompt EngineeringGitHub CopilotAI Guardrails
Master of Computer Science
Universiti Putra Malaysia · 2014

Now

What I'm focused on

A snapshot of what's occupying my thinking at the moment. Updated periodically.

Current role
Engineering Manager, Rightmove

Leading product and platform teams across two London-based engineering areas — stabilising delivery and driving a complex legacy modernisation programme.

Building
AI in the engineering workflow

How do you evaluate engineer productivity when AI is in the loop? What does "good" look like now for velocity, code quality and team growth? Still forming views.

Thinking about
Legacy systems as a leadership challenge

The technical debt problem is often a people and incentive problem in disguise. Solving it requires as much stakeholder management as it does architectural thinking.

Reading
Will Larson — An Elegant Puzzle

A decade late to it. Somehow still the most accurate map of the terrain I work in every day. Every chapter surfaces something I've felt but never articulated clearly.

Get in touch

Let's have a conversation

Open to advisory conversations, speaking invitations, and occasionally the right full-time opportunity. If something on here resonated, feel free to reach out directly.

Emailme@ahmad-mousavi.com
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/mousavi-ahmad
Phone+44 7494 000938