Head of Engineering - Transform

Job Purpose

Job Purpose

RWS is building a new AI-native platform inside our Transform pillar: a multilingual content transformation platform that lets business users self-serve content across markets, with agents rather than projects at its core. It is early, it is already in front of enterprise customers, and it is the most forward-looking product in our portfolio.

We are hiring a Head of Engineering to lead the team that builds it: around a dozen engineers covering backend, AI and agents, frontend, data and test, on a stack of Java services and Python agentic components. The team reports to you and sits with you in Cluj, working hybrid from our office there. Much of what the product depends on is built elsewhere in RWS, so you will work across a global engineering organization every day, with occasional travel to other sites and to customer and leadership meetings.

The team operates with startup-level speed inside an enterprise-class delivery bar, and holding both of those at once is the heart of the job. You will own delivery end to end, act as the unifying technical voice across a group of strong engineers, and be the engineering peer to product management as the platform’s direction takes shape.

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 enough in the concepts to steer senior engineers’ design decisions and spin something up yourself when you need to form your own view.

About Transform

At RWS, we enable the world’s largest enterprises to communicate with global audiences through cutting-edge language technology, AI-driven solutions, and expert services. Our RWS Transform division empowers organizations to accelerate digital transformation, scale global content, and unlock growth in every market.

Job Overview

What you will do

• Build a strong team and the culture that holds it together. Understand each engineer’s strengths, growth areas, working style and pace, and keep everyone on the highest-leverage work rather than whatever is nearest to hand. Set the tone the team works to, one where people trust each other’s judgement, challenge each other openly and take shared pride in what ships. Read where the team is under-resourced or over-indexed relative to the roadmap, and rebalance before it becomes a bottleneck.
• Unify the technical direction. Be the architect who holds the whole picture across a team where several engineers can design serious solutions independently, without becoming the single point of design authority. Steer their decisions, ask the right questions, catch the cross-cutting risks, and leave them room to own their designs. Keep proper engineering practice in place: testable architecture, sound service boundaries, sustainable technical debt.
• Build AI-native. Make AI-assisted development the default way the team works, from code generation through to agentic workflows, backed by instrumentation, testing and observability strong enough that speed never costs us confidence in what shipped.
• Keep the team fast and ambitious. Hold it to startup-level agility, favouring a small empowered team over layers of governance, while meeting the delivery bar an enterprise customer expects, and create the conditions for people to do their best and quickest work without burning out. Own the calls on where to compromise on scope or polish, and where the line holds regardless of pressure.
• Own what reaches customers. Be accountable from roadmap commitment through to production, with the security, reliability and governance that come with enterprise customers landing on you alongside pace. Communicate progress and risk clearly and regularly, translating engineering reality into terms that land with product, commercial and executive audiences.
• Partner across functions. Work with the functions the team depends on, particularly Customer Support and SRE/DevOps, so issues surface early and resolve without escalation. With Product Management, turn roadmap intent into a build plan the team can commit to, surfacing engineering constraints early enough to shape product decisions rather than react to them.

What we are looking for

• Proven experience leading a multi-disciplinary engineering team, spanning backend, frontend, AI and agentic work and QA, shipping a production system. Ideally in a fast-moving or early-stage product context inside a larger organisation.
• Enough hands-on depth to engage credibly with senior engineers on architecture, across Java/Spring Boot and Python with LangGraph-style agentic systems, ideally both, without needing to be the most senior individual contributor in the room.
• A track record of building teams that move quickly because they want to, and the judgement to know when to press for more and when to protect quality.
• AI-assisted development tooling as a core part of how your teams already work, not a side experiment. You have formed your own views by using these tools and watching others use them.
• An instinct to pick up a problem rather than route around it. Plenty of what stands between this product and its customers will sit outside your team, and we are looking for someone who takes ownership of getting it resolved instead of logging it as a dependency and waiting.
• Strong written and verbal communication, and the ability to work as a peer to Product Management: comfortable holding a firm engineering point of view in scoping conversations while staying genuinely open to product input.
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. The destination is clear; much of the route is yours to define.

Within your first year, success looks like a team shipping at a pace that surprises people, with quality intact; senior engineers unblocked and architectural decisions converging without you making every call; stakeholders holding a current picture of progress and risk; and cross-functional dependencies resolving without recurring escalation.

Life at RWS

Life at RWS - If you like the idea of working with smart people who are passionate about growing the value of ideas, data and content by making sure organizations are understood, then you’ll love life at RWS. 

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.