Our people
A note from our People Director, Claire Pallett
15below is a truly exceptional group of people – clever, talented and passionate about everything we do - and it’s an absolute pleasure to work alongside people who are really committed to doing their best. Our culture is all about trust and respect, and we’re very transparent about all areas of the business, sharing regular insights about our performance and our customer relationships. This openness really strengthens our shared commitment to doing a great job, for each other and our customers.
Another factor that really sets us apart is our genuine commitment to our people’s health and wellbeing (we're recognised as a leading UK company for wellbeing). We train our people managers to ensure that they create the optimum working environments for their teams to thrive and succeed in, and can provide extra support whenever needed. We enable everyone to work flexibly to suit their lifestyle and commitments outside of work. And we work inclusively, valuing everyone the same regardless of role, level or background. We also like to have a bit of fun along the way, and don’t take ourselves too seriously!
(Pictured are our people team Claire Pallett and Nisha Gee)
Our culture
At 15below, trust is the cornerstone of our culture. We value every individual and strive to cultivate a collaborative environment where everyone feels a strong sense of belonging. 15below is a really special group of incredible people, who embody trust, loyalty, and respect in every aspect of their work.
At 15below, we celebrate our differences in an inclusive environment, where everyone feels welcome and can truly be themselves. We closely monitor important metrics such as the gender pay gap, which we're proud to say does not exist at our company. Additionally, we're committed to promoting diversity across the organisation and have set important goals for the future. We believe that our team should reflect the wider society and are actively working to break down any barriers to achieving this goal.
Flexible working at 15below
We understand that wellbeing revolves around having a healthy work-life balance, based on flexibility and autonomy. 15below enables and supports flexibility around life’s commitments and a culture built around trust and respect.
We offer truly flexible working options so that every 15belower can decide on a day-to-day basis whether they want to work from our city-central offices in Brighton or Sydney, from home, or a bit of both. There is no requirement to come into the office for most roles, but our dog-friendly offices, social events and amazing colleagues are always a good excuse to pop in!
As 15below is within the travel-tech industry, naturally we’re all passionate about travel. We’ve always encouraged 15belowers to work from anywhere in the world, whether it’s to see family, experience something new or embrace new cultures. At the beginning of 2023, we launched our official ‘Work From Anywhere’ scheme to make it official. Alongside this, we offer ‘Flexible public holidays’ which gives 15belowers the opportunity to ‘flex’ their public holidays and take them off at a time that works better for them.
Join us
We’re always looking for talented people to join our teams.
View our current opportunities and you might find the perfect role to progress your career in the travel-tech industry!
Our team
At 15below, we have a brilliant team of experts who bring years of experience and knowledge that ensures our passenger communications platform delivers an industry-leading solution for our customers.
We have employees from 15 different nationalities.
Our developers have experience with more than 20 programming languages.
The gender pay gap at 15below is zero.
There are 22 15below dogs (and counting), with 10 regular doggy visitors to the office.
Our people make the difference
For over 20 years, we have been developing the systems that power our platform. Throughout this journey, our team has consistently worked together to find innovative ways to improve the advanced algorithms and customised workflows which make our solutions as effective as they are.
The strength of our business lies in the passion, creativity and expertise of the people here. We work closely to create and maintain a platform that positively impacts the travel experiences of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe every single day.
We all know that the travel industry is constantly changing and over the last two decades we’ve come together to overcome a range of challenges including:
Covid-19
The Coronavirus pandemic, brought challenges to the travel industry, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. With global travel halted, we created a task force who worked directly with customers to maximise the use of our platform to communicate with passengers quickly and efficiently. We built microsites to capture customer responses, assisted with the automation and creation of travel credit vouchers, processing refund notifications and sending customers reminders of their entitlement when cancellations occurred. We also recognised the pressure of our airline colleagues and put ourselves forward to become an extension of their team – this included assisting with creating and sending notifications around the clock. As travel restrictions lifted, we worked quickly to create solutions, adapting the 15below platform to help with data collection such as the US CDC’s Attestation and Contact Tracing requirements.
An unexpected ash cloud
In 2010 we helped our passengers deal with issues created by the ash cloud from the erupting Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, when most European countries shut their airspace for two weeks. Our team worked round the clock to create new sites that allowed passengers to acknowledge receipt of cancellation emails, enabled real-time SMS notifications so airlines could share ongoing updates with customers, and implemented efficient processes for airlines to issue refunds seamlessly.
What our people say about 15below
Chelsea Cain, Developer (UK)
When I left university, I didn't quite know the area of tech I wanted to commit my career to. C# was my language of choice, but I really enjoyed other aspects of my course and wanted to find a role that I could explore various options.
15below loved this! And during my time as a Graduate Developer, I worked on ALL types of projects. I did an optional secondment as a Developer in Support, a quick paced role where I was able to manage my own set of customers and workload. I worked directly with the Support Team Manager to identify improvements to a customer’s solution and even worked 1-2-1 with big airline customers to help educate and debug their 15below platform issues.
I'm now working on multiple customer projects, some where I'm Lead Developer, some where I'm supporting and even some projects where I'm my own Project Manager too!
For me, the best aspect of the Graduate Programme was the flexibility in work and the introduction it gave me to industry standard code. We worked on live projects from the get-go, which shows you’re a valued member of the team from day 1. Coming from university can be a little daunting, but 15below provided a great set of interactive sessions, platform demos and pair programming sessions.
On top of that, the graduate team worked together to generate an in-house tool which is still used daily by all the developers!
To top it all off, the mass of company socials AND just how friendly and welcoming 15below is made a HUGE difference to the whole experience. Nobody is ever too busy to approach, and usually colleagues approach you first to make sure everything is OK.
Alex Hedenus, Commercial Account Manager (Germany)
The call with the hiring manager felt like I was talking to a friend. Within the first few minutes, the ice was broken and we were non-stop talking. The hiring manager shared so much information about the team and the things in common with my experience.
I was very happy to get an invitation to Brighton HQ to meet more of the team. It’s such a positive environment and everyone seemed genuinely happy to be working there. It didn’t feel like an interview. It was such a nice fit and everyone was so knowledgeable. Everyone was listening to my ideas and the CEO even said, “why haven’t we done that before?” I felt valued potentially bringing new ideas. From beginning to end, the recruitment process was a 10/10.
Before starting, all my questions were answered and everything went smoothly. I was contacted by both the people team and hiring manager throughout with all the information needed before my first day.
There were so many new faces, customer conference calls, getting to know the products, airlines and airports but there was valuable information provided to help start to get to know everything. I spent time getting to know 15below systems and my people manager and colleagues invested time in me. They emphasised the importance of building on knowledge and just speaking to customers. I really liked that my people manager expected nothing other than for me to learn, ask questions, join customer calls to build up the knowledge for the job and just get to know them.
The people at 15below are valued and I really like how Nick (CEO) is handling the company; he is a wonderful person and I always enjoy having my talks with him. There is a quarterly questions survey which gives everyone an opportunity to regularly provide feedback. What I really like is that 15below make sure they hire people who are professionals in their field, but who are open, sympathetic and helpful. A good investment in people is the key to success.
Chris Blyth, Build and Deployment Manager (UK)
I joined the 15below team in 2008 as part of a university placement in the support team.
As a result of joining 15below when the company was smaller, I have been able to grow myself both technically and as a person alongside the company.
I didn’t know anything of 15below before I applied and didn’t have the exact technical background of the role but was able to learn on the job through my colleagues and exposure to the technical stack and training resources. I have always had an interest in travel and automation and 15below felt like it combined the two areas of interest perfectly.
During my years here I have held several different technical roles, from my foundation in the support team working directly with our customers every day helping them and problem solving. Then moving forward to a development position, working in a delivery team with customers on specific requirements for project delivery of new customers and existing customer change requests. Finally, into my current role owning the build and deployment pipeline, which takes our developer code from our source control system and gets this onto our infrastructure ready for our customers to use.
With a keen interest in automation, I really enjoy being able to create and use our internal automation bot to take manual tasks and processes and automate them to increase productivity and ease of using the build and deployment pipeline.
Throughout my time at 15below, there has always been a very “family” feel about the team where people look out for each other and are always willing to lend a hand.
