Director, Platform Systems

About Us

G Adventures is the world’s largest small-group adventure travel company and we’ve been making epic travel memories happen on all seven continents for over 30 years.

Our mission is simple: to change lives through travel. And not just our travelers’ either. Since day one, our tours have been built to establish meaningful relationships with local communities, directly benefiting the people and places we visit at every step of our tours.

With the demand for travel coming back strong, we are set up and excited for this next chapter in our company’s story — and we’d love for you to be a part of it.

Our DNA revolves around building, nurturing, and developing a diverse culture of people and a true sense of belonging, where everyone is encouraged to bring their authentic self to work each and every day. You’ll have the opportunity to grow your career, and yourself, alongside a passionate, talented, and welcoming community that works hard to spread goodness around the world.

If all that sounds like your kind of thing, well, we can’t wait for you to join us.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Reporting to the VP of Global Technology, the Director of Platform Systems will be responsible for leading the evolution of our current software and infrastructure platforms, as well as building the future versions. The solutions-oriented individual will direct the Reservation, Operational, and API systems teams to develop a customer-centric platform for customizing, booking, managing, and operating trips across the G Travel Community (GTC) portfolio of products. They will be accountable for architecting and scaling the underlying AWS infrastructure which hosts these applications. The candidate will help identify, plan & implement multi-year programs for all practical migrations of applications from future acquisitions, to GTC platforms. As part of the global Technology leadership, the role will be responsible for the mentorship and growth of manager and staff developer direct reports, as well as collaborate with executive leadership across the organization. They will help evolve the current organizational structure of distributed teams and lead the strategy of expansion to new offshore locations.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

• Play a key leadership role in developing and executing strategies that meet business objectives and enabling critical decision making

• Plan integrations of current and prospective G Adventure acquisitions by identifying system synergies & conducting gap analysis to determine how to best meet business requirements

• Present G Adventure product offerings to potential partners, developing white labeling and back office opportunities that leverage proprietary systems

• Lead build vs buy decisions to align with product requirements and stories, architecture specifications, and customer/stakeholder needs

• Work closely with Business Analysts and Project Managers team to ensure technology projects are properly scoped with the correct business stakeholders, risks are being mitigated, and transparent communication with the business is being maintained

• Evolve the SDLC to improve delivery of complex software projects and provide greater predictability of timelines

• Define, report and analyze a comprehensive set metrics to inform decision making on development practices

• Identify engineering challenges and guide the architecture and implementation of scalable solutions

INFRASTRUCTURE

• Define the architecture, design, requirements, and tooling for the AWS infrastructure which hosts custom software applications

• Maintain high availability and reliability of platform systems, by establishing and improving SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs via service performance monitoring

• Lead initiatives to optimize performance, fault tolerance, and alignment with application requirements across queue-based workflows

• Automate cloud infrastructure and configuration, as well as CI/CD of the hosted applications

• Apply DevSecOps practices across the software lifecycle and ensure that all infrastructure complies with regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR)

• Oversee the design and management of complex networking environments, including VPC architecture, VPC peering, NACLs, VPNs, and multi-region setups

• Develop and enforce a log management strategy that optimizes system observability and provides actionable insights

• Forecast budgets for infrastructure requirements and the associated tooling

PEOPLE & LEADERSHIP

• Lead, inspire, manage, and motivate a group of managers (3-4) and senior engineers (2-3) while growing their leadership and technical skills

• Own the expansion of development teams in existing and new offshore locations

• Monitor team member performance, set individual goals, meet for regular 1-on-1s, and perform yearly reviews

• Conduct interviews to assist with hiring qualified team members

• Work jointly with the Global Technology leadership team to define the technology vision, strategy, and roadmaps to ensure success 

• Collaborate with the Global Technology management team to define departmental policy, processes, and procedures that scale across the group of businesses

• Manage communication at all levels of the organization regarding team goals and progress to those goals

• Prioritize a high-volume of competing tasks in an extremely fast-paced environment, while managing stakeholder expectations

DESIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

•  10+ years of experience in software development, ideally with some in travel and tourism or related industries 

• 5+ years of technical management experience

• 5+ years of AWS solutions architecture & services such as S3, ALB, ECS, RDS/Aurora, Elasticache, Lambda, SQS, RabbitMQ

• Experience establishing and growing offshore teams

• Proficiency with architecting CI/CD, accessible logging, performance monitoring, and issue dashboards using tools such as CircleCI, Datadog, Sentry,  Fluent Bit 

• Operational experience with infrastructure provisioning/configuration tools such as Ansible, Terraform

• Strong background in Linux server administration and an understanding of Bash scripting

• Familiarity with containerization technologies such as AWS ECS, Kubernetes, Docker

• Detailed knowledge of agile development methodologies

• Foundation of writing code with the ability to read code in a variety of languages, ideally Python, Go, JavaScript

• Fundamental understanding of data modelling and impact on database designs, clustering and replication

• Foundational background working and building in an API driven architecture, creating scalability for interconnected systems organization wide

• Demonstrated experience engaging with all levels of management including senior level executives and proven ability to manage relationships both horizontally and vertically 

What do we offer you?

• Competitive salary commensurate with the role

• Competitive benefits package 

• Birthday day off

• Vacation time for you to recharge

• Enhanced Parental Leave

• Learning and growth opportunities

• Employee Resource Groups

*Applicable based on location*

G Adventures is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. We consider all qualified applicants.