Localization Manager – Hybrid, Cary, North Carolina
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About the job
The Global Experience Team is seeking a detail-oriented and strategic Localization Manager to oversee our global network of language service providers (LSPs) and provide centralized vendor and quality governance, ensuring vendors consistently meet our operational, linguistic, and quality expectations. This role bridges vendor operations with quality assurance, playing a critical part in delivering localized content that meets our brand, cultural, and technical standards across all markets. This role is critical to ensuring high-quality, cost-effective, and timely localization of product content. You will be a liaison between internal stakeholders and external vendors, driving operational excellence and continuous improvement in localization workflows.
As a Localization Manager, you will:
Vendor Management
- Drive vendor management strategy for the Global Experience team
- Manage a global pool of localization vendors, owning overall vendor relationships, RFPs, onboarding, performance management, and issue resolution, while inhouse Project Managers collaborate with vendors on individual projects.
- Support vendors by providing and/or organizing training and knowledge-sharing sessions to maintain quality standards. Collaborate closely with vendor Quality Managers to ensure quality standards are met.
- Engage with procurement team for contract negotiations and service-level agreements (SLAs).
- Monitor vendor performance using KPIs and quality metrics (i.e. turnaround time, error rates, cost efficiency, test completions); implement corrective actions as needed.
- Act as the primary escalation point for inhouse Project Managers when vendor performance, quality, delivery, or communication issues arise. Own vendorlevel issue resolution and corrective action plans.
- Conduct bi-annual business reviews with vendors
- Maintain and update vendor databases and profiles.
Operational Excellence
- Collaborate with internal teams (Project managers, Translators, Testers) to align vendor capabilities with project needs.
- Drive process improvements and automation in vendor workflows using TMS and project management tools.
- Manage vendor localization budgets and track cost efficiency.
Quality Management
- Oversee linguistic quality assurance (LQA) performance and feedback loops.
- Lead the operational rollout and adoption of the linguistic quality framework ensuring consistent execution across vendors, workflows, and locales through TMS configuration, reporting, and governance
- Support terminology management and translation memory optimization.
- Set up a query management process in collaboration with the Language Operations team and lead an implementation effort
Data & Reporting
- Analyze vendor performance data and generate regular reports for leadership.
- Use data insights to inform vendor strategy and resource allocation. Tooling & Technology Collaborate with engineering teams to improve tool integration and automation.
- Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.
Required qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in working in a localization vendor management role/s - ideally in a stakeholder or client-facing environment.
- Bachelor's degree required, preferably in Linguistics, Computer Science or related fields. Masters is a plus.
- Experience setting up and using linguistic quality framework
- Experience using localization technology (TMS/CAT tools, machine translation, LLMs) and processes, particularly for CICD software deployment model
- Proven ability to solve complex linguistic and technical challenges, attention to detail
- Ability to measure, analyze, and present data to stakeholders.
- Ability to adjust working hours to accommodate a variety of time zones
- Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.
Additional competencies, knowledge and skills
- Experience using project management tools (e.g. Jira) and source management systems (e.g. GitHub).
- Experience with building and maintaining terminology databases
- Certificate in project management (e.g., PMP) is a plus
- Proficiency in additional language(s)
World-class benefits
Highlights include...
- Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
- Medical plan options include:
- PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
- HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
- Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) that’s free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There’s a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
- An industry-leading 401k plan.
- Tuition Assistance Program and programs and resources to support your development
- Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
- Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
- Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees.
You are welcome here.
At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture – it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers.
Additional Information:
To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States, and should not require, now or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status. SAS is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by law. Read more: Know Your Rights.
Resumes may be considered in the order they are received. SAS employees performing certain job functions may require access to technology or software subject to export or import regulations. To comply with these regulations, SAS may obtain nationality or citizenship information from applicants for employment. SAS collects this information solely for trade law compliance purposes and does not use it to discriminate unfairly in the hiring process.
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