Senior Engineering Manager in Sheffield

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead one of our engineering teams within Protect. Protect serves some of the world’s largest patent filers, helping them manage the full intellectual property lifecycle, from filing and translation through to renewals, recordals, and portfolio management. We are in the middle of a significant platform evolution: moving from a services-led model to a modern SaaS product suite and open collaboration platform, with AI-enabled capabilities woven throughout.

The way software gets built is changing fast. AI-assisted development, agentic tooling, and new engineering workflows are reshaping what a small, skilled team can achieve. We are looking for someone who is not just aware of this shift but is actively driving it in their own work. You should be using AI development tools daily, forming opinions about what works, and pushing the boundaries of how engineering teams operate with these capabilities. This role is as much about harnessing that change as it is about traditional engineering leadership.

You will be spinning up a new team with modern ways of working, modern tooling, and a clear DevSecOps mindset. The team will build new systems while also maintaining, upgrading, and retiring legacy ones. You should be comfortable with a “you build it, you run it” culture where engineers own their services end to end, from design through to production operations. You will work closely with product, design, and business stakeholders to ensure engineering is well aligned with commercial and strategic goals.

Key Responsibilities

• Leading and growing a new Protect engineering team, establishing ways of working, tooling, and culture from the ground up.
• Remaining hands-on: contributing to architecture decisions, design reviews, and code where it adds the most value.
• Driving adoption of AI development tools and agentic workflows across the team, and staying at the leading edge of how these tools change engineering practice.
• Setting technical direction for the platform in collaboration with your team, balancing modernisation ambitions with pragmatic delivery.
• Owning engineering delivery for your team, including planning, prioritisation, and execution.
• Embedding a DevSecOps culture with full production ownership, where engineers are responsible for the security, reliability, and operation of what they build.
• Building strong partnerships with product managers, designers, domain experts, and senior business stakeholders.
• Establishing engineering practices: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, security scanning, and deployment workflows.
• Creating an environment where engineers can do their best work, with clear expectations, regular feedback, and genuine development opportunities.
• Helping the team navigate domain complexity, including patent lifecycle workflows and IP data structures, and building enough context to make sound technical decisions.
• Representing Protect engineering within the wider engineering organisation, contributing to cross-cutting initiatives and standards.

Skills & Experience

• Significant experience in software engineering, with a progression into engineering management.
• A strong technical background, with the ability and willingness to stay close to the code and architecture.
• Comfort working across multiple technology stacks (e.g. TypeScript, Java, .NET) rather than being tied to one.
• Hands-on experience with AI development tools and a genuine interest in how agentic tooling is changing software engineering.
• Experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong understanding of containers and modern deployment practices.
• A DevSecOps mindset with experience embedding security, observability, and operational ownership into engineering culture.
• Track record of delivering complex software products or platforms.
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with day-to-day execution.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and business contexts.
• Experience building engineering culture: hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and developing engineers.

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 first 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.