Senior Manager of Localisation

About Us

The Localization Team delivers world-class language localization and translation with the goal of ensuring that every traveller's experience is local to fulfil our mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

Role Overview

The Senior Manager Localization will be responsible for the global commercial strategy, execution, and optimization for Localization and Translation at Booking.com, the world's leading online travel platform.

The scope of this role extends beyond linguistic translation to encompass a multidisciplinary content strategy for localization, ensuring cultural relevance, visual adaptation, and an optimized user experience across all digital touchpoints and emerging channels.

The Senior Manager Localization will report directly to the Director of Content and will directly lead a team responsible for the localization and translation efforts of Booking.com from the Content organisation, a team in the Marketplace Department. They will work across large and diverse teams to drive the overall strategy and execution of localization in different regions, resulting in the best travel content in all the languages (and priority markets) we support.

They will develop a strong culture by nurturing and growing talent, influencing stakeholders within their own area of responsibility, and collaboration with a large variety of stakeholders from across Booking.com to understand their needs. They will also drive definition tiers of translations and localization services, taking into account cost of service, speed of delivery, quality, and means of fulfilment.

Keys Responsibilities

• People Management and High Performance Culture
  
  
  • Identify skill and role requirements needed to deliver services within Translations teams, optimising performance frameworks and learning journey to upskill accordingly.
  • Developing teams & talents: set the talent strategy and drive talent development, constantly setting the standard for performance, behaviour, and contributions to other teams within Booking.com.
  • Lead linguistic QA and quality review processes (including establishing and maintaining appropriate KPIs), ensuring localized content meets high standards through the effective management and growth of our language teams.

• Strategic and Commercial Awareness
  
  
  • Provide thought leadership to identify areas for growth and improvement to scale the business, including new areas of focus and process optimizations.
  • Analyse data and insights to understand topic, industry, and consumer trends that lead to incremental business.
  • Responsible for implementing a multi-year Translation and Localization strategy that aligns with immediate business needs while also proactively anticipating future needs of the business so we can start laying the foundations for success.
  • Review our current language offerings with a critical eye of the needs within our mature and growing markets.
  • Partner with commercial teams on the ground to identify local platform needs.
  • Develop and implement a comprehensive content globalization strategy that ensures cultural appropriateness, visual adaptation, and an optimized user experience across diverse platforms (e.g., web, app, voice, emerging technologies) and content types, aligning with overall business objectives.
  • Define, track, and report on key localization performance indicators (LPIs) and their direct impact on critical business metrics such as conversion rates, user engagement, market penetration, and customer satisfaction across diverse locales

• Data Centric and Technology Proficient
  
  
  • Define and build a hybrid model of in-house, freelance, generative AI and machine translation capabilities with clear workflows to support the platform and stakeholders. If required, redefine the delivery model to best support the changing nature of the business over time.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering to improve localization workflows and internationalization infrastructure
  • Responsible for constantly challenging the status quo trying to find new and better ways to do Localization through process optimization, measurement, and technology in liaison with our Engineering, Product and Data Science teams.
  • Operational perspective that seeks to continually optimize our service offerings, balancing cost-effectiveness and quality.
  • Beyond written content, actively explore, define and implement approaches for localising other content types.

• Localization and Translation Innovation
  
  
  • Work with cross-functional teams across Booking to advocate for our global users, generate insights, initiate projects, and drive international experience and localization decisions related to languages.
  • Develop a comprehensive strategy, vision and operational plan for Localization with clear priorities and focus to deliver against overall business objectives and KPIs.
  • Incorporate qualitative and quantitative user research, A/B testing, and feedback loops into localization processes to validate cultural relevance, usability, and the overall impact of localized content and product experiences.
  • Lead the implementation and optimization of agile localization methodologies, ensuring seamless integration with product development cycles and continuous delivery of high-quality, localized content at speed.
  • Coordinate glossary, style guide, and terminology management across all languages for consistency across product and marketing.

• Budget, Vendor and Stakeholder Management
  
  
  • Identify and lead critical stakeholders and dependencies, building partnerships with key organisations across Booking.com and Booking Holdings. Find opportunities to increase an international perspective across the company.
  • Ownership of Localization P&L with clear governance and a focused approach to the budget, with responsibility for continuous alignment with FP&A.
  • Evolve and diversify the vendor ecosystem, identifying and fostering strategic partnerships with traditional language service providers, technology providers (e.g., for AI/ML solutions), and specialized content agencies to meet evolving localization needs.

• 15+ years deep expertise in translations in an international e-commerce environment
• Proven experience of category or translations management or similar
• Wide knowledge of the translation's industry, with an established network and ability to collaborate with third parties as vital
• Experience working with Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams to iterate on technology (tooling, software, machine translation) that drives and supports translation management
• Solid understanding of localization workflows, tools (TMS, CMS, connectors, APIs), and infrastructure.
• Experience piloting AI/ML-assisted translation workflows with human-in-the-loop QA.
• Ability to use process innovation to drive impact
• Excellent commercial acumen and ability to combine big picture thinking with pragmatism
• Experience of role development and performance frameworks within translations
• Strong ability to prioritise according to business needs
• Proactive and results-oriented attitude
• Analytical approach with strategic ability. Comfortable working with a data-driven approach.
• Excellent communicator with stakeholder management experience
• Be able to deliver impactful presentations at executive level; great interpersonal and communication skills.
• Skilled in vendor management