closed vacancy Chief Architect (Remote)

Hello!

Thanks for taking a look at the job description for a Chief Architect at Impala. We felt a little bit impersonal just throwing you right in there with words like “revolutionizing”and “disrupting”.

As such, we want you to know that the person that wrote this job description apologises in advance for any clichés, startup tropes or sudden-insecurity-driven-panic-attacks that you might find in the description below.

What is Impala now?

Impala makes building travel software incredibly easy. We provide hotels with a powerful data management platform that makes connecting to software, hardware and room distributors extremely easy. Think Twilio for Travel.

We launched in January 2019 and since then have grown at - quite frankly - a ridiculous pace. Our technology is already installed in hundreds of hotels worldwide, on six continents and categorises more than 1 billion data points.

We are a growing team of exceptional people split across engineering, product and commercial that have built a fantastic, remote-but-far-from-distant community.

Where is Impala going?

We’re supported by some of the best investors in the business, the early stage backers behind Deliveroo, PillPack, SecretEscapes, Zoopla, Trivago and more. They’re on board because of our vision - revolutionizing a $1.6 trillion dollar market that’s been out-of-date for 20 years.

Within the next two years, 25% of hotel bookings worldwide will flow through Impala technology and the product that we’re building will empower the entire ecosystem of travel technology (we already have over a thousand companies signed up).

Anyone travelling anywhere will interact with products powered by Impala and to achieve this we’re growing the team to 50 people within the next year. So now is the most exciting time to be joining Impala as we go through a large push to scale up!

A brief overview of what you’ll be up to in this role:

As chief architect, you will act as the technical authority in a top-tier engineering team, ensuring that our technology can meet both immediate and future needs. You will report to (and work alongside) our VP of Engineering. 

Technology sits at the heart of our business, which makes this a pivotal role with key responsibilities: 

• You will lead on technology strategy &prioritization, managing short term technical risks and long term investment in our stack
• You will be accountable for technical quality at Impala, including the reliability, security, and extensibility of our services and data 
• You will ensure that monitoring, metrics and SRE practices are in place across all teams and services, to measure and meet high service SLA’s / expectations 
• You will be the direct leader of an enablement group, which provides specialist technical/DevOps/SecOps support to our development teams
• You will provide technical direction and mentorship across teams to support the development of individuals 

You should join us if: 

• You have 10+ years of relevant and diverse product and engineering experience, with a period of executive-level responsibility at an organization with a strong engineering culture
• You are an expert in the architectural design, development, and operation of large scale, high availability services 
• You have demonstrated experience with modern web services, distributed service-oriented architectures and services that handle large quantities of data, across multiple different stacks. 
• You aren’t afraid to get hands-on when necessary to demonstrate an approach / principle 
• You are comfortable leading and mentoring teams and individuals

Where in the world will you be working?

This is a remote position. This means you can work from anywhere +/- 2 Hours of London, timezone wise (and less than a 3 hour flight).We are a remote-first company, our whole engineering team is fully distributed! This was a very deliberate choice to prioritise work-life balance and ensure we’re able to accommodate the best people in Europe. We have loads of remote initiatives to ensure you’re fully setup!:

• We give you an additional generous Personalised Workspace Budget for things like monitors, keyboards, desk chairs and headphones.
• We offer an office stipend (you can furnish a home office with a generous monthly stipend, or choose a co-working space near you).
• You’ll travel once a quarter to meet and socialise with the rest of the engineering team somewhere in Europe.
• You’ll have a generous Social Budget to travel to London based social events. You'll also have a special 'Loved Ones Budget' that we're incredibly proud to offer, we'll tell you more about that when we speak to you!
• We have a dedicated Remote Experience Manager in the team, who, amongst other things, will be ensuring you're happy, integrated and empowered whilst working remotely.
• We will give you a brand new high-spec laptop when you start, giving you the choice between a Thinkpad or Mac.

Please note, we only accept candidates in Western Europe because of timezone and travel time differences. We make no exceptions (we don’t have time to!).

What you’ll get if you join us: 

• We’re in the top 14% of companies in the UK for holiday that we offer, at 36 days - so you’ll have plenty of time to rest and recharge
• We also offer Impalans one Unsick day per year, so you can proactively look after your health (time to finally book that dentist appointment!)
• Impala believes that great people should be able to focus on developing mastery of their skills, even if they don’t want to manage people. Here you’ll be able to access 3.5x the average annual raise, even staying in the same role.
• We put our money where our mouth is when it comes to investing in your development - you’ll have access to a generous yearly learning budget to help you realise your potential. 
• We offer all engineers a Weekly Recess Hour. This is an hour to take off and step out from work and invest in You Time! Lawn mow, yoga, walk or movie anyone?
• We offer an extended lunch break option, meaning you can take an extra hour lunch break, and we trust you to make up for it later in the day.
• We offer a stipend to set up your ideal place of work. You can choose between the option of £150 per month to build out your home office, or we’ll pay for your membership at a coworking space near you up to £350.
• In addition, we give you a special Personalised Workspace Equipment budget for things like monitors, keyboards, headphones or desk chairs.
• You’ll travel once a quarter to meet the rest of the team in an engineer colocation week, somewhere in Europe.
• You’ll have a Social Budget to travel to/from &stay in London for a night, for our monthly Impala Social.
• You’ll have a generous Friend &Family Budget, to get your close friends and family over once a year.
• We’ll organise socials around your area with other remote workers. 
• We have a Health &Wellbeing scheme in place, offering you the option of a monthly gym membership reimbursement each month, or a health food voucher each month;access to Headspace; Vitality health insurance (UK only);plus the chance to win a massage monthly. Plus loads more.
• Perkbox. A platform designed to help you to live a better life by personalising, managing, delivering and measuring the best company perks in real-time. 
• You’ll be working somewhere that encourages collaboration, is transparent, has a strong focus on wellbeing, and doesn’t just pay lip service to it’s Core Values.

Sound interesting? 

If you are excited to learn more then please check out our Medium page which includes more information about who we are, what we do, what matters to us, and our culture.

Want to know more about our CEO, or want a deeper understanding of our what and why? Watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxBZuoxCbKM