Chief Architect

The Zonal group are one of the UK’s largest technology providers to the hospitality industry.

Our suite of more than 20 products are used by over 16,000 pubs, restaurants, and hotels. Customers include national brands like Pizza Express and All Bar One.

We are a family business with Scottish roots. We operate from our modern head office in Edinburgh to our Division in Staffordshire, or our Innovation Centre in Abingdon and hotel management solutions base in Cardiff.

Job Role Summary

We’re looking for a Chief Architect who shares our passion for driving innovation and using technology to build better businesses. Someone who deeply understands and embraces the challenges faced by both our customers and us as we evolve our current and next generation product suite.

Although not critical, we would especially love to hear from you if you have a background in one or more of Hospitality, PoS devices, Payments, Supply Chain, Loyalty and Voucher Schemes, and Online Ordering.

What You’ll Do

As our Chief Architect you’ll be leading our small team of dedicated Architects to ensure we effectively support Zonal and our customers in delivering new and updated products to market whilst ensuring our technology choices are future-facing, scalable, reliable, and secure.

Sustainably lead your team:

You’ll provide day to day leadership, management, support, and guidance to your team. Ensuring your team operate with high accountability, integrity, and transparency.

• Proactively lead your team in rapidly delivering viable, high-quality solutions and designs.
• Work with your team to ensure designs and decisions are sound and sustainable.
• Ensure priorities, goals, and delivery constraints are clearly understood.
• Provide effective line management and support to your team.
• Ensure you have the correct mix of experience and roles within your team contributing towards talent motivation, morale, and retention.
• Ensure your team is aligned with company strategy, motivated, and making a positive difference.
• Mentor and coach, your team in lean and agile architectural practices, advanced design, and technology change management.

Deliver secure, scalable, reliable, valuable products:

Ultimately architecture delivers most value when it reaches our users.

You and your team will: -

• Provide technical and architectural designs to drive forward the architecture of our product suite.
• Partner with heads of Security, IT, Support, Operations, R&D, and Product to deliver strategic and tactical technology solutions for Zonal.
• Collaborate with customers and suppliers to support large scale architectural programmes.
• Provide expertise and support on performance, scalability, and reliability of product architecture.
• Provide leadership across the architecture and development community to ensure solutions align to common platform principles and standards.
• Provide architectural oversight and leadership for key cross team development efforts.

Improve how we work:

You and your team will work together to ensure we have effective architectural processes. Ensuring appropriate tools are in place for your team so that they can work unhindered.

• Implement and support a suitable technology evaluation, selection, and lifecycle process.
• Improve architecture, design, technology selection, and technology introduction processes.
• Support and lead research and innovation activities in partnership with product teams.
• Drive team collaboration to proactively identify dependencies and integration points.
• Partner across teams to improve and support consistency in common technical areas.
• Promote cross-team communities of practice to drive shared learning, improvement, commonality, and consistency across teams to ensure we make best use of our wider/collective knowledge.

Communicate effectively:

Use relevant communication, reporting, and metrics to demonstrate progress and continual improvement from your team…

• Manage, communicate, and escalate risks, issues, and blockers to stakeholders.
• Provide clear, actionable reporting and feedback on the status of your team and dependencies.
• Use a regular reporting cadence to review and update plans, checks, and make any corrective actions and improvements needed to support your team.

Who You Are

You will have substantial hands-on experience developing products and architectures that are inherently secure, robust, scalable, modular, and global.

• You have a proven track record of developing, leading, and implementing modern architectural practices across product development and infrastructure in complex multi-site organisations.
• You’re an expert technologist with broad knowledge across both modern and legacy enterprise software, architecture, infrastructure, cloud, and application development.
• You have a deep knowledge and understanding of IT governance and operational risk.
• You have excellent commercial acumen – part of your role will be customer and commercial facing at times.
• You’re a successful change agent – with experience leading organisations through strategic change and innovation cycles.
• You have a technical background in enterprise-scale product development using (at least) C#, Azure, and SQL Server. Although the wider your experience, the better as we use a wide variety of technology stacks.
• Extra Bonus points for you if you also have networking, hardware, and mobile device development and deployment experience.

Leadership

You’re the go-to person to unblock problems, find novel but viable solutions, support your people, our business, and our customers.

• You will have experience of rapid business and priority shifts and be able to keep your team motivated, energised and on track through periods of change.
• You will set the tone for your team by consistently acting as a role model for our values.
• You will coach and mentor your team in how to operate more effectively at both a personal and team level.

Communication

You will be experienced in communicating and partnering stakeholders at all levels, and tailor your communications to the relevant audience.

• You understand that identifying and escalating risks and issues is not enough and provide recommendations and solutions wherever possible.
• You take people on the journey with you and help them see both the vision and the steps to get there.

Teamwork

You excel working with teams and customers across organisational boundaries regardless of their technical background.

• You partner well with other key organisational functions e.g., Sales, Services, Product Management, Infrastructure, Security, Support, and Operations to deliver effectively.

Accountability

You’re motivated by getting things done, and getting them done in the right way, achieving the best possible outcome within the constraints given.

• You have a proven track record of successful delivery through agile architectural practices in complex enterprise environments.

What we value

Teamwork, Innovation, Passion, Professionalism, Accountability and Customer Obsessed are the values we believe make us the company we are. We are looking for someone who understands great culture and will help us shape it as it evolves.