Head of Engineering - Protect

RWS Protect helps the world’s leading businesses protect their most valuable ideas, supporting the full intellectual property lifecycle from patent filing through to renewals, search and brand protection. We are modernising the Protect technology estate: building new products on a modern AWS stack, with AI embedded into both our products and the way we build software, while running and rationalising the systems that serve our customers today.

We are hiring a Head of Engineering to share leadership of this estate. A significant part of your remit will be new development: forming and growing the teams that build the next generation of Protect products. Alongside that, you will own your share of the existing estate, driving the deliberate decline and decommissioning of legacy systems as new capabilities take over their workloads. You will work in close partnership with an established engineering leader, with scope divided between you pragmatically rather than along a clean new-versus-old line.

This is a leadership role, not a hands-on coding role. But you will be technically credible, opinionated about modern software product development, and confident in spinning up the systems and making an assessment yourself when required.

The role reports to the VP of Engineering. You will inherit a small organisation and grow it: the expectation is several new teams formed over your first couple of years, alongside the existing estate you take on.

About Product & Technology

Product & Technology plays a pivotal role in aligning the organization with its strategic objectives and enhancing shareholder value. Product & Technology is responsible for establishing unified standards and governance practices throughout the company. Additionally, we oversee the development and maintenance of core applications essential for the seamless operation of various functions across the organization. We are committed to driving and executing future roadmaps that are in line with the overall strategic direction of RWS. 

With a global reach, Product & Technology provides support services to over 7500 end users worldwide. We take pride in managing the information security operation and safeguarding all our assets. Our core functions encompass Enterprise & Technical Architecture, Network & Voice, Infrastructure, Service Delivery, Service Operations, Data & Analytics, Security & Quality Compliance, Transformation, Application Development, Enterprise Platforms, With a dedicated team of over 500 staff, Product & Technology ensures a strong presence across all regions, enabling efficient and effective support to our global operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and grow new engineering teams. Our team model is small, autonomous pods: a product or engineering lead plus a handful of strong engineers who own outcomes end to end, on a you-build-it-you-run-it basis. You will hire these teams, shape them, and protect their way of working as they scale.
• Deliver new products and services. Much of the new development will sit with you: products and services (for example AI-assisted capabilities and customer-facing portals) built on shared design patterns with a deliberately low operational burden.
• Drive legacy decline and decommissioning. Own the running of part of the existing estate, and plan and execute the progressive replacement of ageing fulfilment systems behind a clean abstraction layer, in close partnership with your peers. Success means workloads migrating, systems switching off, and no big-bang cutover risk.
• Champion AI-native engineering practice. We expect engineers at every level to work fluently with AI development tooling (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and whatever comes next). You will set the bar, embed it in how teams work and how we hire, and keep us at the front of the industry rather than catching up to it.
• Connect engineering to product and commercial outcomes. Work daily with product leadership to shape roadmaps around customer value, and be accountable for what your teams ship, run and retire.

Skills & Experience

• A track record of leading software product engineering organisations through significant change: building teams from scratch, scaling them, and retiring what they replace.
• Deep, genuine experience of agile product development done well. Small empowered teams, short cycles, continuous delivery, outcomes over output. You have lived this, not just read about it, and you can tell the difference between agility and ceremony.
• A strong, demonstrable interest in applied AI development tooling. You have formed your own views by using these tools and watching teams use them, and you have opinions about where they genuinely change the economics of software delivery.
• Experience with modern cloud-native architecture, ideally on AWS, and with strangler-style migrations away from legacy estates. You know how to replace systems incrementally and how to make decommissioning a first-class deliverable rather than an afterthought.
• Strong hiring instincts. You attract good engineers, you assess for learning speed and judgement rather than credentials, and you raise the bar with every hire.
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. The destination is clear; much of the route is yours to define.

Our purpose is to unlock global understanding. This means our work fundamentally recognizes the value of every language and culture. So, we celebrate difference, we are inclusive and believe that diversity makes us strong. We want every employee to grow as an individual and excel in their career. 

In return, we expect all our people to live by the values that unite us: to partner, putting clients fist and winning together, to pioneer, innovating fearlessly and leading with vision and courage, to progress, aiming high and growing through actions and to deliver, owning the outcome and building trust with our colleagues and clients.

RWS embraces DEI and promotes equal opportunity, we are an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. RWS is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at RWS are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation. RWS will not tolerate discrimination based on any of these characteristics. 

RWS Values 

Get the 3Ps right – Partner, Pioneer, Progress – and we´ll Deliver together as RWS.

Recruitment Agencies: RWS Holdings PLC does not accept agency resumes.  Please do not forward any unsolicited resumes to any RWS employees.  Any unsolicited resume received will be treated as the property of RWS and Terms & Conditions associated with the use of such resume will be considered null and void.

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