Localization Manager

About komoot

Komoot is an app that lets you find, plan, and share adventures with its easy route planner. Driven by a love for nature and powered by the outdoor community’s recommendations, komoot helps you explore more of the great outdoors—wherever and however you want. And we're good at it. Google and Apple have listed us as one of their Apps of the Year numerous times. Today, with over 35 million users and 300,000 five-star reviews, we are well on our way to becoming the most popular app for finding, planning, and sharing adventures worldwide.

Join our 100% remote team and start your adventure with komoot.

About the role

As komoot’s first Localization Manager, you’ll own the translation process end to end. This includes day-to-day translation coordination, ensuring high-quality translations that match our casual and friendly brand voice, and working closely with our in-house writers and freelance linguists. You’ll define the best processes to triage requests, manage projects and freelancers, ensure quality, and connect our TMS to teams and software tools. This is a specialized and technical role spanning project management, process automation, emerging technologies (CAT, ML), and linguistic understanding. Our ideal candidate is experienced, can deftly manage translations, and is excited to develop and implement a strategic POV on how we could scale localization over time.

Ready for your next adventure?

What you will do

• Own and facilitate the localization process, from intake and briefing to final delivery.
• Liaise with internal stakeholders to ensure useful briefs, clear expectations and deliverables, and to keep stakeholders updated on progress and delivery.
• Maintain linguistic tools to ensure translation quality and performance, including style and TOV guides, glossaries, etc.
• Track translation quality with routine LQA audits of copy in production. Work with linguists and agencies to improve quality where needed.
• Own and maintain our TMS (Phrase), including workflows, integrations, templates, term bases, translation memory, and our contract/seats in the tool.
• Manage relationships with our fantastic team of external translators, aligning capacity and deadlines with multiple stakeholders, communicating briefs and quality feedback, hiring additional linguists, etc.
• Monitor translation cost and budgets, brainstorming ideas for cost savings (while keeping quality high) together with your Team Lead
• Develop processes to automate localization tasks while maintaining a high level of quality (i.e. Phrase integrations, template creation, Trello automations, etc.)
• In due course, plan and collaborate on larger-scale localization projects and strategy, such as additional language roll-out, internationalization projects, advising on localizability, etc.

Note that this is a technical and operational role with no actual translation or copywriting required.

Why you will love it

• Your work will contribute to helping millions of people enjoy lovely outdoor experiences.
• We’ve been a remote-working company since 2017, meaning: We are remote by default, have frameworks and systems in place, and know how to do it well.
• You can work from wherever you want, be it a beach, the mountains, your house, or anywhere else that lies in any time zone between UTC-1 and UTC+3.
• We have your costs covered for your co-working space membership or your work-from-home office setup and the latest devices and equipment to do your best work.
• You’ll become an essential part of our diverse and international team with colleagues based in 20+ countries across Europe.
• 38 paid days off (inclusive public holidays) – you are free to take those days whenever it suits you, including a well-deserved winter holiday break.
• We love seeing people grow. That's why each team member gets €2,000 and 3 additional days to spend on professional development each year. Classes, conferences, books – your choice!

Requirements

You’ll be successful in this role if you

• Have 3+ years experience as a localization project manager, including managing freelance teams and translations across multiple languages
• Have experience defining and improving localization processes for marketing, product, and technical copy
• Have experience with localization software, including workflow optimization and automation
• Keep up with localization best practices, technologies, and trends
• Are organized and comfortable managing multiple projects and competing deadlines at once
• Are a strong and proactive communicator, able to break down complex technical topics so that anyone can understand them. You’re comfortable giving and receiving feedback, and work with diverse teams to get buy-in on ideas.
• Are a team player and enjoy working collaboratively alongside writers, linguists, designers, and developers. You build strong relationships based on mutual trust.
• Want to be part of a high-performing team where continuous improvement, collaboration, open feedback, and communication are encouraged.
• Nice to have: Translation experience, especially in German, French, or Dutch

Not sure if you meet all requirements above? Don't sweat it – if you think you're the right person anyway, we'd love to hear from you!

Benefits

Curious about how we work?

• Core Communication time between 10 am - 3 pm (Berlin Time). We know people have different lifestyles, which is why we have flexible working hours with core time for synchronous interaction. You can organize your workday in the way that best suits you, your family, and your needs.
• We work on a project basis in cross functional teams to ensure that we collaborate on our goals, move forward smoothly with open lines of communication, and achieve results as a team.
• Every Monday morning, we have a whole-company presentation where you hear about projects across the business, inspire each other, and share great work.
• We connect in person at three whole-company gatherings each year in beautiful locations. You can check out this playlist to find out more about how we stay close while being remote.
• We use tools like Trello, Slack, Miro, Zoom, and Google Workspace on a daily basis to stay connected, collaborate easily, and manage projects.

Dive a little deeper and learn…

• More about our team here: Meet the Team
• More about how we work here: How We Work
• More about our recruitment process, salary and FAQs here: FAQs

We support diversity and inclusivity and welcome all prospective applicants. We have an ongoing recruitment process (no deadlines) – if this role is online, it means it’s still open!