Senior Director Security

Job Purpose

RWS is seeking a Senior Director Security to lead the protection of our global IT and digital assets. In this pivotal role, you will

shape and execute our cybersecurity vision, proactively defending against emerging threats while ensuring compliance with

regulatory requirements and industry best practices. This is an exciting opportunity to make a meaningful impact across a complex, international technology landscape, working at the forefront of innovation and resilience.

Job Overview

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Vision

• Define and execute the security strategy, positioning security as a core enabler of business growth, product quality, and customer trust.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Developer & Production Enablement, Data, Enterprise Tech, and service delivery organisations (Generate, Transform, Protect) to align security to business goals.
• Provide visible leadership and thought partnership across RWS, influencing the board, senior executives, and global teams.
• Set the vision and direction for each of the six security disciplines:
• Threat Detection & Response
• Security Engineering
• Awareness & Culture
• Governance, Risk & Compliance
• Data Protection & Privacy
• Tools, Platforms & Enablement

Security Enablement & Technology

• Build security platforms, tools, and golden paths that enable engineering teams to embed security early and effectively.
• Ensure automation and self-service capabilities accelerate secure development, CI/CD, and operations.
• Establish clear standards and practices that are easy to adopt and support engineering autonomy.
• Drive security architecture alignment across cloud, platforms, and services, ensuring scalable and resilient designs. 

Operational Excellence

• Lead prevention, detection, and response practices across the six disciplines, ensuring continuous improvement and measurable outcomes.

• Oversee incident response, red/blue team exercises, and resilience planning to minimise impact and strengthen recovery.

• Embed monitoring, metrics, and feedback loops to drive accountability and transparency.

• Ensure compliance with relevant standards and regulations (e.g. ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA), balancing pragmatism with governance.

Commercial & Financial Management

• Own the security discipline budget, ensuring investment in tools, teams, and partnerships delivers maximum ROI.

• Partner with Sales and Commercial teams to support security responses in RFPs, client due diligence, and bid processes, ensuring security requirements are accurately costed, planned, and positioned as a differentiator for RWS.

• Make strategic build vs buy decisions for security tooling and services.

• Deliver accurate forecasting, risk assessments, and performance reporting to senior leadership.

People Leadership

• Build and lead a high-performing global security organisation of senior leaders, architects, and engineers.

• Foster a culture of enablement, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Partner with engineering leaders to embed security champions and communities of practice across teams.

• Attract, retain, and develop top talent, ensuring strong succession pipelines.

• Act as mentor and coach to leaders, raising the bar for technical and leadership excellence

Skills & Experience

Essential:

• Senior leadership experience in security at enterprise scale, spanning multiple security domains.

• Deep knowledge of modern product and technology operating models (DevSecOps, Team Topologies, platform as product).

• Proven ability to enable engineering organisations through security platforms, tools, and practices.

• Strong track record of partnering with senior executives and boards to shape security strategy.

• Commercial acumen in cost management, vendor negotiation, and ROI measurement.

• Demonstrated leadership in change management and embedding security culture across complex global organisations.

• Excellent communication, influence, and storytelling skills, with credibility at executive level.

• High integrity, pragmatism, and ability to balance innovation with governance.

Desired:

• Experience in applied AI/ML security, cloud-native architectures, or SaaS platform security.

• Exposure to M&A integration and securing complex legacy environments.

• Thought leadership in modern security enablement practices.

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.

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