Lead Engineer

Summary

Join Xero's Tooling team as a Lead Engineer, owning and improving core engineering tools. You will maintain infrastructure for internal tools like SonarQube and Playwright, build integrations for streamlined engineering processes, and design scalable architectures. As a senior team member, you will mentor others and drive technical decisions to enhance the developer experience. Responsibilities include providing technical leadership, ensuring high availability and reliability of infrastructure, building automation and integrations, and applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You will also partner with engineering teams, lead initiatives to improve tooling, write documentation, and contribute to on-call rotation. Staying current on tooling trends and shaping long-term strategy are also key aspects of this role.

Requirements

• Proven experience in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or internal platform tooling
• Strong background in cloud architecture and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipeline concepts and distributed version control (e.g., Git)
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, C#, .NET)
• Experience managing or integrating engineering tools like SonarQube, LaunchDarkly, Playwright, or similar
• Excellent problem-solving skills, especially when diagnosing infrastructure or integration issues
• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills to drive adoption and support
• Passion for improving engineering experience and building systems that scale well
• Experience writing internal documentation that supports onboarding, usage, and operations

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team, guiding architectural decisions and ensuring best practices are followed
• Own and maintain infrastructure for key internal tools, ensuring high availability, scalability, and reliability
• Build and evolve automation and integrations to support seamless CI/CD workflows across engineering teams
• Apply Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ideally with Terraform, to provision and manage tooling environments
• Partner with engineering teams to embed tooling into pipelines and development workflows
• Lead initiatives to uplift monitoring, observability, and operational readiness of tooling
• Write and maintain clear, useful documentation (e.g., setup guides, best practices, runbooks)
• Contribute to team’s on-call rotation and drive incident resolution and postmortems
• Champion best practices in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and internal platform reliability
• Collaborate across teams to drive adoption of tools, unblock usage issues, and enable self-service
• Stay current on tooling trends and emerging practices, helping shape long-term strategy

Benefits

• Very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!)
• Dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing
• An Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family
• Free medical insurance
• Wellbeing and sports programmes
• Employee resource groups
• 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers
• An Employee Share Plan
• Beautiful offices
• Flexible working
• Career development