Head of Reliability and Operations

Job Purpose:

You'll lead the Reliability & Operations function within the Developer & Production Enablement (DPE) division of RWS's Product & Technology organisation, leading our reliability engineering culture, operating model, and maintaining critical infrastructure operations for our products.

Your mission is to evolve traditional cloud and production operations into a modern, automated, and SRE-led capability that empowers teams to move fast with confidence.

You'll be responsible for operational excellence, observability, and engineering incident response across RWS's technology landscape, while shaping a reliability culture that values learning and continuous improvement.

As Head of Reliability & Operations, you'll take ownership of global production operations and lead the transition from manual, ticket-based workflows to platform-integrated automation.

You'll manage distributed operations, 24/7 support, and reliability engineers, embedding Site Reliability Engineering practices and strengthening collaboration across Platform Engineering, Product Engineering, and Enterprise Technology.

This is both a transformational and operational role, ensuring stability today, while designing for scalability and autonomy in the future.

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

Lead and transform operations

• Own the operational health, performance, and uptime of RWS's production and cloud environments.
• Transition from manual operations to automated, self-service models using the Core Platform's capabilities.
• Define and implement operational metrics, SLAs, and service ownership standards.

Build and embed reliability engineering

• Establish Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across DPE, Enterprise Tech Services and Product Engineering.
• Introduce SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and continuous feedback loops into operational processes.
• Implement blameless post-incident reviews and reliability learning sessions.

Advance observability and detection

• Lead the consolidation and evolution of monitoring, logging, and tracing tools.
• Deliver unified observability and detection frameworks supporting both operations and development.
• Partner with Platform Engineering to ensure observability is built into every service by default

Strengthen incident and support capability

• Lead global production support and 24/7 incident response coverage.
• Streamline escalation, triage, and root-cause analysis practices.
• Develop clear ownership boundaries and playbooks for consistent response.

Collaborate across teams

• Partner closely with the Director, Platform Engineering to define the automation roadmap and reduce operational toil.
• Work with Engineering, Security, Data, and Enterprise Technology Services on governance, monitoring, and compliance.
• Build strong relationships with product engineering teams to embed reliability thinking from design to delivery.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Extensive experience leading cloud operations, support and reliability engineering in complex environments
• Proven experience transforming operations into modern automated-driven practices
• Strong technical background in cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), automation and observability
• Deep understanding of incident management, monitoring, and reliability frameworks.
• Calm, decisive communicator with experience managing complex client and stakeholder environments

Nice to Have

• Experience building or leading observability platform teams.
• Familiarity with DORA and operational excellence metrics.
• Background in managed hosting or multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Experience with on-prem to cloud migration contexts

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.