Principal Software Engineer (W2, Agentic AI)

RWS runs hundreds of thousands of localization projects a year. Much of that work still depends on our operations teams reading signals, chasing status and making routine decisions by hand. We are building W2, our next-generation localization automation platform, and we want AI agents to take on part of that work so operations can scale without growing at the same pace.

This is a greenfield initiative with a new team. Some agents will make recommendations while people keep the final decision. Others will run multi-step workflows on their own, inside boundaries we define and can audit. Your job is to make both kinds trustworthy enough that operations teams want to use them.

You will work alongside two engineers as the team’s technical lead. You will own the architecture of the W2 agentic layer and make the final technical call, while writing a meaningful share of the production code and helping your colleagues make good decisions of their own. The team works with several other W2 teams, and the agent patterns, tools and guardrails you set will become the standard they build on. You will report to the Engineering Director and present technical direction to engineering leadership. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports: you lead through expertise.

The team also works as forward-deployed engineers. You will spend about 30% of your time with RWS operations teams, learn how they work and build agents around their actual problems.

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.

Key Responsibilities

Build the agentic layer

• Build agents that use W2 tools and data to analyse situations, recommend actions and run workflows such as content analysis, routing and progress tracking.
• Design how agents find and use W2 data: retrieval, context and memory.
• Support graduated autonomy, from shadow mode through human-approved actions to autonomous execution.
• Create reusable building blocks for tool integration, state, configuration and orchestration.
• Decide when an agent is the right answer, and when a plain workflow, a rule or an off-the-shelf product is better.

Make it dependable

• Design for long-running work: retries, recovery, cancellation and idempotent actions.
• Build permissions, approval gates, audit trails and data protection in from day one.
• Set up evaluations that measure agent behaviour against business outcomes, and make quality, latency, failures and cost visible.
• Use those evaluations to compare models as they evolve, including models beyond Gemini, and to recommend changes, so each task runs on the cheapest model that does it well.
• Own the system after launch: deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement. There is no on-call rotation.

Give people control

• Build the backend services, APIs and W2 integrations behind the agents.
• Build, or adapt from open source, the admin tools people use to configure agents, manage prompts and policies, review recommendations and inspect executions.

Lead technically

• Set direction for the agentic layer and explain the trade-offs to engineers and stakeholders across teams.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review.
• Break ambiguous problems into increments that ship value early without compromising the long-term architecture.

Skills & Experience

• A track record of owning complex backend systems in production: APIs, asynchronous processing, messaging, persistence and failure handling.
• LLM-powered applications you have taken past the demo stage, including tool use, structured outputs, evaluation and operational concerns.
• Strong backend coding skills and comfort working across languages. C#/.NET experience is an advantage.
• Willingness to build simple internal UIs, or to adapt open-source ones.
• Experience running cloud systems with proper CI/CD, observability and security.
• Principal-level influence: you have shaped architecture and grown engineers across teams without formal authority.
• Practical knowledge of agent security: prompt injection, secure tool execution and least-privilege access.
• Sound judgement about what LLMs cannot do reliably.
• High agency: you find the problem, propose a path and move forward without waiting for a full specification.
• Clear communication in English, and the ability to explain technical trade-offs to engineers, operations staff and managers alike.

Nice to have

• Google Cloud, especially Vertex AI and Gemini.
• Agent frameworks such as Google ADK or LangGraph, or your own equivalent; MCP or similar tool-integration protocols.
• Durable workflow engines and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Agent tracing and observability tools such as Langfuse or OpenTelemetry.
• TypeScript and React.
• Forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering experience.
• Localization, translation management or multilingual content processing.

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.