Staff Engineer in Sheffield

We are looking for a Staff Engineer (Platform) to join a new team within Protect and play a central role in building the next generation of our IP platform. 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.

This is a hands-on engineering role in a team being built from scratch with modern ways of working and modern tooling. You will design, build, and ship software that directly impacts how IP professionals work. The team will build new systems while also maintaining, upgrading, and retiring legacy ones. We operate a “you build it, you run it” culture where engineers own their services end to end, from design through to production operations.

AI development tools and agentic workflows are changing how we build software. We expect you to be actively using these tools, pushing their boundaries, and helping the team get the most out of them. You should have opinions about what works and a desire to stay at the leading edge of how engineering is done. You will also help raise the bar on engineering quality and practices across the team, contributing to architecture decisions, code quality, and the way we deliver software.

Key Responsibilities

• Designing and building key parts of the Protect platform, including APIs, services, integrations, and user-facing features.
• Taking ownership of significant technical areas and driving them from concept through to production and ongoing operations.
• Using and championing AI development tools and agentic workflows as part of daily engineering practice.
• Contributing to architecture and technical design decisions, particularly around platform modernisation and data model evolution.
• Writing clean, well-tested, production-ready code as a daily practice.
• Owning the security, reliability, and operation of the services you build, with a DevSecOps approach throughout.
• Improving engineering practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, security scanning, and deployment workflows.
• Collaborating closely with product managers, designers, domain experts, and other engineers to deliver meaningful outcomes.
• Mentoring and supporting engineers across the team through pairing, code review, and technical guidance.
• Working with domain-specific workflows, including patent lifecycle processes and IP data structures, and building an understanding of how the technology supports specialist professional users.

Skills & Experience

We do not expect candidates to match every item below. Strong engineers learn quickly, and we value curiosity, judgement, and adaptability. You will likely have experience in many of the following areas:

• Several years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of delivering complex systems.
• Strong backend engineering skills, comfortable working across multiple technology stacks (e.g. TypeScript, Java, .NET) rather than being tied to one.
• Experience building and operating APIs and distributed services.
• 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 owning the security and operation of services you build.
• Understanding of modern delivery practices: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and production ownership.
• Ability to work across the full development lifecycle, from early design through to deployment and operations.
• Clear communication skills and a collaborative working style.

Experience with some of the following would be beneficial:

• React, Next.js, or modern frontend frameworks.
• Event-driven or message-based architectures.
• Working in regulated, compliance-sensitive, or IP-adjacent domains.
• Building or operating AI-enabled products (LLM integration, intelligent automation).

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. 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.