Incident & Production Response Lead

Job Purpose

The Incident & Production Response Lead is responsible for improving how RWS detects, responds to and learns from production incidents across Product & Technology.

The role will establish a consistent incident management approach, strengthen 24/7 production response, and work closely with SRE, Platform Engineering, Product Engineering and Production Engineering teams to improve the operability and resilience of our services.

A key focus will be evolving RWS towards a modern, engineering-led production response model, improving response effectiveness while reducing avoidable operational toil.

The ideal candidate is calm under pressure, ensuring incident response runs smoothly and teams remain focused on agreed recovery strategy. They are genuinely enthusiastic about process improvement and abstracting challenges away from technical teams. This is a high visibility role at the intersection of engineering culture, AI-assisted software development, developer enablement and customer experience, working directly with product and technical teams, and senior leadership.

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.

Job Overview

Key Responsibilities

• Own and continuously improve the Product & Technology incident management framework, including major incident response, escalation and post-incident learning.
• Drive improvements to the effectiveness and maturity of RWS's 24/7 production response capability
• Establish clear incident roles, escalation paths, response expectations and measures of performance.
• Work closely with Production Engineers and product engineering teams to improve production readiness, runbooks and response capability.
• Partner with SRE to improve alerting, observability, reliability practices and the operational usefulness of telemetry.
• Identify recurring operational issues and ensure they are addressed through engineering, automation or platform capabilities rather than repeated manual intervention.
• Use incident and operational data to identify systemic reliability improvements and influence engineering priorities.
• Coordinate effectively across engineering, support, service management, security and other teams during significant production incidents.
• Help establish a culture of clear ownership, continuous learning and engineering-led operational improvement.

Skills & Experience

• Calm under pressure - leads teams clearly and decisively during high-stakes incidents, and establishes composure as the organisational standard.
• Clear communicator with an ability to translate  complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders, and communicating clearly across a diverse organization.
• Strong experience in incident management, production operations, SRE, DevOps or a related discipline.
• Experience supporting customer-facing, cloud-based production services in a complex technology organisation.
• Good understanding of modern incident response, observability, alerting and production diagnostics.
• Experience improving operational or 24/7 response capabilities and ways of working.
• Strong technical credibility and the ability to work effectively with software, platform, SRE and production engineers.
• Ability to lead and coordinate effectively during high-impact incidents.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills across technical and business audiences.
• A strong bias towards automation, engineering solutions and eliminating repetitive operational work.

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.