Head of Quality Engineering

RWS; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

RWS is evolving its Product & Technology organization into a high-velocity engineering ecosystem. As Head of Quality Engineering, you will empower engineers to own code quality, eliminate bottlenecks, and align quality standards across distributed teams.

You will consult with product teams to ensure secure, robust software delivered with velocity. You will lead a technical QE community, drive adoption of automation pipelines, and partner with Security, Privacy, and Data teams to operationalize

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, CI/CD automation, or automated quality engineering.
• Deep, hands-on experience with modern automation frameworks, contract testing, and performance/load testing tools.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD systems, containerization, and cloud-native architectures enabling integration of test automation into pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute a comprehensive Quality strategy shifting testing left.
• Establish end-to-end automation testing frameworks and tooling for SaaS and on-premise products.
• Lead a team of Quality Engineers and mentor them in testing design and risk-based strategies.

Skills

Quality Engineering leadership

Test automation

CI/CD & DevSecOps

Cloud & containerization

Tools

GitHub Actions

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

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 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.

Job Purpose

At RWS Group, we are evolving our Product & Technology (P&T) organization into a high-velocity, autonomous, and self-sustaining engineering ecosystem. As part of this journey, the Technology Enablement and Innovation team acts as the "Customer Success" engine for our developers, partnering across disciplines to ensure that doing the right thing is always the easiest thing.

To support our modernization and drive for more efficiency, we are shifting from a downstream Quality Assurance gatekeeping model to an upstream Quality Engineering model.

As the Head of Quality Engineering, you will lead this critical strategic and cultural engineering transformation. Guided by our core principle You Build It, You Run It, you will empower software engineers to take full, autonomous ownership of their code quality. You will build and lead a highly technical, matrixed community of Quality Engineers (QE). Your mission is to eliminate testing bottlenecks, align quality standards across distributed teams, and act as a consultant and trusted advisor to help product teams deliver stable, secure, and robust software with maximum velocity.

Responsibilities

Strategic Quality Enablement & Tooling

• Quality Engineering Transformation: Design and execute a comprehensive Quality strategy that shifts testing left, ensuring quality is a design-time concern and an integral part of the development lifecycle, eliminating lengthy feedback cycles.
• Testing Architecture: Establish and maintain modern, standardized end-to-end automation testing frameworks, tooling and local test-helper libraries appropriate for our diverse SaaS and on-premise products.
• AI & Automation Scaling: Partner with teams to leverage emerging AI-assisted test generation tools to accelerate developer self-testing.
• Product Alignment: align with the Product team to embed quality and reliability as key considerations in product design.
• Security, Privacy and Data: Collaborate with the Security, Privacy and Data teams to ensure their policies and requirements are operationalized within the quality practices, framework and tooling.

Practice Consulting, Coaching & Community

• Team Upskilling: Recruit, mentor, and manage a team of Quality Engineers who operate under a dual-reporting model (dotted-line to you, solid-line to their embedded engineering squads).
• Technical Consulting: Train QEs to act as senior consultants to engineering teams, educating teams on testing design and requirements, helping set up automation pipelines, and helping designing risk-based testing strategies before coding begins.
• Community of Practice: Establish and champion a Quality Engineering Community of Practice to foster knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and technical alignment across RWS engineering teams.

Governance and Visibility

• Flow & DORA Metrics: Use DORA and Flow Metrics to systematically identify delivery bottlenecks and potential quality issues. Use these metrics to drive reporting on quality trends across the organization and target QE support.
• Platform Integration: Work closely with the Platform Engineering and Technology Enablement teams to bake quality metrics, templates, and testing golden paths directly into the platform.

Requirements

Technical Experience

• Engineering Credibility: 8+ years of experience in software engineering, CI/CD pipeline automation, or automated quality engineering.
• Test Automation: Deep, hands-on experience with modern automation frameworks, contract testing, and performance/load testing tools.
• DevSecOps & Platform Fluency: Strong understanding of modern CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native architectures (AWS/GCP), enabling you to integrate test automation seamlessly into developer pipelines.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Inspiring Change Agent: Proven track record of driving cultural transformations in software quality, shifting teams from manual verification to automated, developer-driven testing models.
• Exceptional Communication: Strong influencing and coaching skills. You must be able to act as a trusted peer to Engineering Managers, helping them upskill their teams and maintain a high standard of practice.
• Developer Empathy: A commitment to designing lightweight, friction-free quality guardrails that fit naturally into the modern developer's daily workflow, making "doing the right thing the easiest thing."

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

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.