AIS Quality Director
Ireland
Corporate – Quality /
Full Time /
Remote
As a trusted global transformation partner, Welocalize accelerates the global business journey by enabling brands and companies to reach, engage, and grow international audiences. Welocalize delivers multilingual content transformation services in translation, localization, and adaptation for over 250 languages with a growing network of over 400,000 in-country linguistic resources. Driving innovation in language services, Welocalize delivers high-quality training data transformation solutions for NLP-enabled machine learning by blending technology and human intelligence to collect, annotate, and evaluate all content types. Our team works across locations in North America, Europe, and Asia serving our global clients in the markets that matter to them. www.welocalize.com
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
OVERVIEW
The AI Services Quality Director is responsible for delivering services and solutions to Welocalize customers and accountable for a group of Quality Leads and Managers or manages a team of Quality Leads.
The Quality Director main objective is to ensure the quality team members in their group understand their client requirements, engage the global team in the fulfillment of those requirements, craft and deliver client quality solutions, and is accountable for achieving assigned Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and achieving and exceeding financial performance of their group.
Main duties
- In concert with Quality leadership and Quality Leads, define quarterly Group Quality OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in alignment with the company OKRs.
- Ensure the Squads in their group are balanced in terms of quality workload and resources and ensure that there is bandwidth within the team.
- Assist Quality Leads in measuring and reporting OKR result progress at the required cadence.
- Proactively identify actions and opportunities to achieve and exceed objectives.
- Ensure quality process, knowledge and process efficiencies are cross pollinated across the different Squads in their group.
- Ensure the Squads in their group are aligned on quality strategies to achieve their OKRs and also the group is meeting the quality group OKRs.
- Responsible for performance management (supervision, coaching, career development, and people activities such as time off and expense approval) of Squad leads in their group.
- Utilize business intelligence to monitor Squads performance and assist Quality Leads to improve performance with regular cadence.
- Monitor quality financial and operational metrics (KPIs).
- Support Quality Leads on implementation and execution of quality initiatives resulting in increased customer satisfaction, operational leverage, increased profitability, and resource quality of deliverables.
- Drive the adoption of existing and new production tools in compliance with defined processes and procedures.
- Drive the initiatives outlined by the Quality Leadership Team.
- Point of escalation for Quality Leads.
- Adopt, implement, and govern agile processes and practices for quality.
- Responsible for owning and auditing global processes to ensure standardization across all global Squad groups, also applicable to all initiatives outlined by the Quality Leadership Team.
- Partner with the Sales Team in providing RFP responses and other support to nurture and win new business opportunities. And give guidance to the Quality Lead to support in this effort.
- Support compliance efforts and quality audits.
- Identify and establish the most efficient quality processes for new global and cross-functional service lines or for new service offerings.
- May prepare and present on quality initiatives to clients as needed.
- Where Leads may not be available for a particular Squad, the Group Lead will support the needs of that Squad.
- Responsible for ensuring that their team is up to date on ISO processes and procedures and for support on new ISO certification.
- Operations Reporting Management, Productivity and Efficiency Reporting: assist Quality Leads in monitoring, monthly reporting and implementing efficiency initiatives to improve and/or achieve cost targets.
- Team management: motivate Quality Leads and Managers while supporting their growth and development through active engagement with the Career Framework & Organization Model.
- Supervision, mentoring and coaching of Quality Leads and Managers on Agile.
- Develops excellent follower-ship across the company through sphere of influence.
Requirements
- Experience:
- Collaborative attitude and proven program management experience in a fast-paced, client-centric environment, ideally in the translation or localization industry.
- Proven ability to lead large diverse teams, both local and remote.
- Knowledge of the language services industry and a keen interest in its technology, process, competitive landscape, and emerging trends.
- Has a wide knowledge of the principles, practices and processes in the entire Quality Team.
- Experience with quality strategy and pragmatic approach focus on processes and problem solving.
- Demonstrated success at managing large accounts and/or programs.
- Risk assessment and mitigation experience.
- Solves highly complex situations with the support of the quality team in-line with company policies and procedures.
- Curiosity and creativity to question existing processes and approaches and innovate new ones.
- Proven experience in development of processes and ideas.
- Extensive experience in customer relationship management.
- Encourages teamwork and understands the need to share knowledge.
- Demonstrated experience in leading teams.
- Experience in Agile Methodology and/or Lean Six Sigma is an advantage.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to present structured arguments to diverse audiences, incl. colleagues, customers and vendors, and influence others.
- Adept at data literacy; ability to understand and utilize data to make decisions.
- Minimum of a Masters degree or equivalent experience.
- Encourages teamwork and readily shares knowledge.
- Supervisory Responsibilities:
- Carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with the organization's policies and applicable laws.
- The role requires managing a team and serve as a contact for external team members.
- Responsibilities include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; appraising performance; rewarding and disciplining employees; addressing complaints and resolving problems.
Key competencies
- Ability to think strategically and articulate ideas and plans with the professional maturity to participate at senior management level.
- Can lead customer quality meetings and capture requirements and set success factors.
- Actively drives their teams and has a positive impact.
- Shows good negotiation skills and situational awareness.
- Can establish & develop processes and procedures as part of a global initiative across functional areas.
- Exhibits empathetic leadership skills and has a passion for mentoring & coaching of Quality Leads.
- Requires customer-centric approach and attitude.
- Encourages empowerment of the Quality Leads.
- Cross cultural leadership competency.
- Is comfortable with change management processes and will ensure that Quality Leads will manage change within their teams.
- Knowledge and awareness of business quality trends.
- Drives quality collaboration among the different Squads in their group: facilitates decision making and actions in the context of delivery to the customers.
- Understands the importance of Objective & Key Results (OKRs) and is results orientated.
- Proactively develops clear solutions to highly complex problems.
