Localization Manager

Proton · London

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-09-28
  • Confirmed live on 14 October 2026

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Job description

Join Proton and build a better internet where privacy is the default

Proton was founded in 2014 by scientists from CERN on a simple truth: privacy is a fundamental human right. Since then, we've built the world's largest encrypted email service (Proton Mail) and expanded into Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Calendar — tools used by millions globally to protect their freedom, fight censorship, and keep their data safe. In some situations, Proton has literally helped save lives.

We are profitable, independent (no VC control), and selectively hire from the top ~1% of applicants. Our 700+ team members from 50+ countries come from leading organizations and elite academic backgrounds. We move fast, keep hierarchy light, and prioritize impact over optics. If you want to do meaningful work with exceptionally high-caliber people, this is it. Check our open-source projects here.

The Localization Team

The Localization team makes sure Proton works, and sells, in every market we serve. We own how product launches and growth content reach people in their own language and culture — in-app strings, pricing pages, CRM email flows, app store listings and marketing materials. Some products in our portfolio are mature and others are launching now, so several workstreams run at once against fixed release dates.

We work in product pods rather than one shared queue. Each manager owns a portfolio end-to-end — releases, vendors, quality, stakeholders — with a trained backstop in a neighbouring pod, so no product ever depends on one person being online. Which products sit in which pod shifts as the roadmap shifts; how we work doesn't.

Beyond delivery, we're building the practice that proves localization's commercial impact through data and experimentation. You'll do well here if you want to own outcomes end-to-end and can handle a vendor escalation and a go/no-go call on the same day.
What You'll Do

• Own the lifecycle for your portfolio. From string freeze to general availability — initiation, planning, execution, closure. Coordinate Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing and Support against fixed release dates, and be the person who knows whether a locale is actually ready to ship.

• Run the machine. Administer our TMS and CAT workflows, keep handoffs clean between stakeholders, and maintain the assets that make repeatable launches possible: scoping models, timelines, locale-readiness checklists, go/no-go criteria.

• Keep your spend on track. The Localization Lead owns the budget; you look after your corner of it. Track translation costs per product and per language, reconcile monthly, and flag drift while it's still cheap to correct — not after it becomes an overrun that needs explaining.

• Build and manage the vendor bench. Recruit, pre-qualify and test suppliers and freelancers for your portfolio; maintain SLAs, NDAs and documentation; track quality and turnaround; run quarterly business reviews. Escalate to the Localization Lead, and pull in Legal and Finance when a blocker needs them.

• Ensure adaptation, not transliteration. Growth-facing content — CRM and lifecycle email flows, campaign landing pages, marketplace listings, pricing, signup and feature messaging — gets rewritten for the market, not converted word for word. You brief and review the adaptation, and you flag cultural and regulatory risk before release. Where your portfolio includes lifecycle email, you also own its template internationalization and content logic.

• Be the reference point. You are the linguistic and internationalization contact for your stakeholder group — Product Managers, UX Writers, Marketers, Developers and Support — and you raise the bar beyond it through retrospectives, corrective-action reports and the occasional proof of concept.

• Ship experiments, then measure them. With the CRO team, execute localized variants and campaign content inside your portfolio. As the area grows, you take on more: framing localization hypotheses, interpreting results within the growth team's experimentation framework, and segmenting funnel data by locale with Product Analytics to find where language and culture cost us conversions.

Who You Are

• You've owned localization projects or programmes end-to-end, including multi-workstream, multi-market launches against dates you couldn't move.

• You work in English daily (B2–C2) and you have native or professional working proficiency in at least one other language. Any language counts — what we're really testing is whether you've lived long enough inside a second language to tell copy that sounds native from copy that's merely correct.

• You can administer TMS and CAT tools hands-on, and you know localization best practice and internationalization standards well enough to argue about them.

• You've managed vendors and freelancers against quality, turnaround and cost targets, and you've watched a spend line closely enough to catch it moving before anyone asked you to.

• You're com

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