Why Airbox? You're more likely to love your work when that work has a purpose, when it's meaningful and when it's protecting lives. And, at Airbox Systems, it will. Here's why.

We are driven by passion and great people who share our enthusiasm for trying to make the world a better place, our friendly team includes individuals with backgrounds in military, aviation, and law enforcement. Our experience brings first-hand insight into frontline operations in the air and on the ground to enable cutting-edge concepts for improving the service that we deliver.

At Airbox, our values can be described as behavioral guidance. They are the principles and beliefs that provide a cohesive vision and define who we are as a business. In doing so, they define our organisation internally, and externally with our stakeholders and customers. In essence, they are our “true north” that help us to navigate our organisation through prosperous times as well as uncertain periods. Our company beliefs and values are embodied in our culture. Whilst we celebrate the diversity of the people we work with, there are certain values and attributes all of us share – whatever your background, these are the qualities we are looking for in the people we hire: Commitment, Positive Realism, Ethics, Accountability, Humanity, Quality, and Delight.

What this role is about:

As the Head of Architecture for Airbox you’ll be responsible for designing and driving the architectural strategy for our current and future products, working in collaboration with Heads of Engineering, Product, Platform Engineering and Infrastructure. This is an amazing opportunity to set the architecture strategy, standards and roadmap to enable Airbox's ability to continue to scale at pace as it enters a new phase of growth. You will work as part of a dynamic technology leadership team covering product management, architecture, engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure and quality and will be working closely with the team alongside the CTO to deliver the next stage of Airbox's incredible journey.

The Head of Architecture will develop and be accountable for Airbox’s Architecture Strategy, ensuring that we can deliver products at pace and that in doing so we meet high standards and recognised industry best practices across all areas of architecture. Like most businesses, we have legacy issues and technology we need to deal with so you will need to assess the state of our current architecture and rapidly put in place plans and programs of work to modernise where necessary. You will also design the next phase of our industry leading products, taking the learnings from our journey so far, and building a next generation platform for our customers. We are focussed on using industry recognised approaches to high performance including Google’s DORA framework, Team Topologies and Agile practices and we want you to bring in best practices in architecture as we design our next generation of products..

You will have demonstrable experience of replatforming monolith architectures, as well as designing and building new high availability, secure, scalable, mission critical systems and taking a leadership role in working with teams to ensure we deliver at pace and that we build high quality, flexible solutions.

You will be viewed as a thought leader within the organisation through knowledge sharing, mentoring and driving initiatives to continuously improve how we build our products, ensuring our product and the underlying technologies are designed, built and tested to the high standards expected by Airbox customers. You will manage a small architecture team ensuring that everyone is given the opportunities to grow and develop their careers at Airbox. Culture is the make or break of engineering teams and you will set a culture around high standards, high performance and learning, building the motivated, excited team that you need to succeed.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Direction & Planning

• Working closely with the CTO and other members of the technology leadership team you will be responsible for defining and implementing architectural strategies and roadmaps in alignment with the company's objectives. You will build and own the Architecture strategy for Airbox, ensuring it meets the goals of the Airbox Business Strategy and Technology Strategy with a strong focus on best practices and frameworks.

• Understand the business and technology vision for Airbox and take a leadership role in defining and running programs of work that help us to meet our goals and objectives, guiding teams in alignment with overall business goals and industry best practices.

• Communicate effectively and transparently the architecture vision, strategy and progress to senior leadership teams at regular intervals.

• Ensure we are driven by metrics and that we use these to “get better and getting better”.

Leadership & Team Management

• Work across multiple software engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Take overall accountability for our architecture, ensuring that associated projects are on track and are meeting expected delivery milestones and technical standards.

• Build and maintain a strong culture of innovation, and collaboration by driving the success and effectiveness of communities of practice and encourage a strong knowledge sharing culture.

• Line management of staff ensuring teams have support, mentoring, career development opportunities and ensuring thorough performance management is in place.

• Recruit new team members as needed.

• Be a strong advocate for our values and be seen as a leader in demonstrating them at all times.

Driving best practices

• Responsible for leading our architecture strategy driving best practices in order to maximise the performance of the Engineering team to deliver against the overall product and technology roadmap, the quality of our Engineering effort and the continuous improvement of our systems to ensure that we can scale at pace.

• Be an advocate and ambassador for best practices in architecture and engineering, helping to drive high performance across teams.

• Work as part of cross team groups to establish and drive improved working practices and mentor teams to improve performance and efficiency.

• Be an internal thought leader through knowledge sharing, running technical sessions and raising the standard of the way we build our products.

Technical oversight

• You will have technical oversight of our entire product architecture, ensure our engineering teams adopt designs, languages, frameworks and best practices that align with our strategy to deliver world class products to our customers.

• Oversee the design, development, and delivery of architecture programs of work..

• Establishing metrics and monitoring systems to track application performance, stability, code health and test coverage and work closely with Product Management to align improvement plans with customer issues driving improved customer satisfaction.

• Ensure that the tools being used are fit for purpose and used efficiently and effectively, and that we have good documentation and knowledge sharing in place.

Collaboration & Cross functional involvement

• Collaborating with product management, design, and other stakeholders to ensure successful product releases, working closely with Product Managers and other members of the Technology leadership team to ensure we are aligned on priorities at all times.

• Ensure compliance with regulatory standards at all times ensuring that we are addressing security concerns throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Driving the resolution of technical challenges and leading efforts to improve processes and practices.

Continuous Improvement and Innovation

• Staying abreast of emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends to incorporate into the organization's practices.

• Developing the technology radar for Airbox ensuring that we are making technology decisions that are well founded.

• Investigate new technical opportunities for Airbox (e.g. AI) and work with Product teams to understand where technology advances can add to the product roadmaps and drive new commercial opportunities.

Technology We Use:

At Airbox, we use a wide variety of platforms, technologies and tools to support the development of our various products. You should have experience of all of these technologies and in the designing and building of products and platforms in similar technology..

• Web applications

  • React / NodeJS

• Current iOS and Android development using .NET 8 /Maui

• Android

  • Support the latest 4 OS versions (12+)

  • Kotlin, Jetpack Compose

• iOS

  • Support the latest 2 OS versions (17, 18)

  • Swift, SwiftUI

• Backend services

  • .Net Core

  • ASP.NET Core

• ● Supporting technologies

  • Kubernetes

  • Kafka

  • AWS

  • REST API / Microservices

  • PostgreSQL / MS SQL

  • Prometheus / Grafana

  • GitHub Actions

  • GitHub

  • GIS

  • Jira & Confluence

About You:

• Extensive experience as a Technical Architect in fast growing, product led businesses, ideally in a previous Head of Architecture of Lead Architect role.

• Proven track record of leading the design and build of complex software projects from conception to production with high availability, secure products.

• Have significant experience with designing, and delivering SaaS web applications and backend services within cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) with a good working knowledge of underlying technologies.

• Deep understanding of architecture best practices and the knowledge and gravitas to drive change and improvements in these areas focussing on achieving high performance.

• Can build, lead and developing high performing architecture teams

• Are passionate about the potential of technology and what it can enable, with a keen awareness of current technology trends, and the ability to see the potential application of new technologies to user value.

• An effective communicator with both external and internal stakeholders and immediate teams.

• NPPV3 Clearance: Successful candidates must pass an NPPV3 clearance upon successful application, which requires 3 years of UK residency.

What we offer: We’re always looking for new ways to celebrate our people. You’ll be no different.

• The chance to work with a passionate team that’s working together everyday towards our shared big ambitious goal

• A dynamic, flexible and fun scale-up work environment with a highly talented team

• 26 days holiday per year, plus public holidays

• Private medical cover with Bupa for all our colleagues, as well as a Wellbeing Allowance each year

• Pension scheme, offering up to 6% matching contribution

• Up to 20 Nomad Working Days per annum

• Personal Development budget

• Electric Car Scheme

• Truly living our value of Delight; we run Company Socials including Christmas and Summer parties alongside activities and gifts throughout the year

Flexible & Hybrid Working: We said you'll get freedom to work in a way that is best for you, and that extends to being in the office – or not.

Work better from home? No worries. Prefer the office? Come on down. We have 2 mandatory Townhall days; Spring and Autumn, where the whole business gets together. When you visit the office you won’t just find rows and rows of desks. No, you’ll find our colleagues meeting on the walking pads, having planning sessions over a game of tennis table or grabbing a bean bag in our ‘Quality’ collaborative space - that’s right we live our values so much, we named our meeting spaces after them.

You can also shape work around your life at Airbox Systems; most colleagues work our core hours of 9am-5pm with others flexibly between 7am-7pm. Whether you're fitting in a spin class or the school run, you'll have the flexibility for whatever matters most. All we ask in return is that you produce great work, but when you’re working with passionate people, that part comes naturally.

Connect with us: Interested in the role, or Airbox in general, but you don’t meet 100% of the requirements? We’d love to hear from you! We encourage you to connect with us here; we’d be excited to see if your unique skill set and experience could be a match for future roles.

A note for Recruitment Agencies:

Agencies, we appreciate you… but unsolicited CV’s will not be reviewed. We will only accept CV submissions for roles briefed to you by us. Please don’t keep pulling the attention of our Support team from our customers.

If you would be interested in working with us – please send a message to hr@airboxsystems.com, should we have anything we need additional support on we will reach out to you.