Director of Engineering - Generate

Job Purpose

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

 

RWS Generate builds the content technology that some of the world’s biggest companies rely on to create, structure and publish the content behind their most complex products, from the largest names in automotive to leaders in aerospace, technology and financial services. Alongside this established business we are scaling a fast-growing AI business, providing the high-quality data and expertise that powers some of the most advanced AI models in the world.

Job Purpose

 

We are hiring a Director of Engineering to lead engineering across this portfolio: scaling the AI-native products and services that have real momentum, while modernising, simplifying and returning to growth a set of established products with enviable customer bases. You will set the technical and organisational direction for both.

This is a leadership role, not a hands-on coding role. But you will be technically credible, with well-formed views on modern software product development, and comfortable forming your own view of a system or a team when required.

The role reports to the VP of Engineering and takes on an organisation of several established engineering teams and their leaders, spread across Europe.

Location

This is a hybrid role, ideally based in Dublin, where you will work alongside senior product leadership from our Dublin office part of the week. We are also open to strong candidates based in the UK. Some travel to other RWS sites and to team locations across Europe will be part of the job.Start Date

The position is expected to start in October 2026.

Job Overview

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.