Director of Engineering - Generate

About RWS

RWS is a global leader in content, translation, and intellectual property services. With more than 60 years of experience, RWS helps the world’s top brands grow by ensuring they are understood anywhere, in any language. The company combines proprietary technology with deep human expertise to deliver high-quality, compliant, and scalable solutions across industries such as life sciences, technology, finance, and legal.

About Generate

Responsibilities:

• Lead and develop the engineering leadership team. Several engineering leaders and their teams will report to you. You will provide clarity, coaching and strategic direction, and set a high standard for leadership itself: clear ownership, honest prioritisation, decisions made at the right level, and managers who grow their people rather than just run their projects.
• Set the engineering direction for the pillar. Own engineering quality, reliability, scalability and security posture across the portfolio, and champion scalable architectures, AI-first design and secure-by-default engineering, aligned with RWS’s long-term technology strategy.
• Scale the growth side of the portfolio. Our AI-focused business is growing quickly. You will make sure engineering scales with it: hiring well, keeping teams small and empowered, and protecting quality and pace as demand increases.
• Modernise and simplify the established products. Several of our products have been serving demanding enterprise customers for many years. You will drive their modernisation: simplifying architectures and portfolios, retiring what no longer earns its keep, and reinvesting the capacity into growth.
• Champion agile, product-led ways of working. We organise around small, empowered, outcome-owning teams: a product lead and an engineering lead with a handful of strong engineers, on a you-build-it-you-run-it basis. Where teams are living this, you will protect it. Where they are not, you will work with them to change it, bringing the judgement to tell the difference between real agility and ceremony.
• 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 lead by example, 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.
• Make delivery predictable without adding bureaucracy. Ensure teams deliver dependably through lightweight governance, data-driven progress tracking and honest communication. Remove blockers, improve sequencing and dependency management between product lines, and create the conditions for teams to execute at speed. Guardrails, not bottlenecks.
• 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.
• Represent the pillar across RWS engineering. Work with our central platform, data and security functions so teams operate within clear guardrails, and influence roadmap trade-offs, investment decisions and long-term architecture evolution in strategic forums.

Requirements:

• A track record of leading multi-team software product engineering organisations through change: developing leaders, reshaping teams, and lifting delivery in both growth and legacy settings.
• 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 have improved organisations that were falling short of it.
• A genuine, demonstrable interest in applied AI, both in what we build and how we build it. You have formed your own views by using these tools and watching teams use them, and you have a clear sense of where they genuinely change the economics of software delivery.
• Experience modernising established enterprise software: simplifying products and architectures incrementally, managing technical debt deliberately, and doing it without breaking the trust of large, long-standing customers.
• Commercial instincts. You understand that engineering choices are portfolio choices, and you are comfortable weighing investment, cost and customer commitments alongside your product peers.
• A leadership style rooted in coaching, psychological safety and accountability, with a track record of scaling engineering organisations while keeping teams healthy. You introduce structure without bureaucracy.
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. The destination is clear; much of the route is yours to define.

Research tells us that candidates, particularly from under-represented groups, often only apply when they match every requirement. If this role excites you but you are not sure you tick every box, we would still love to hear from you.

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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