Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

Join Xero's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team as a Lead Engineer to drive observability strategy and enhance engineering capabilities. You will own shaping observability at Xero, driving OpenTelemetry adoption, and mentoring engineers. This hands-on role requires expertise in monitoring, measuring, and improving system reliability and performance. You'll collaborate with various teams to align efforts with SRE and company goals, focusing on a seamless customer experience. The position involves technical leadership, improving system reliability, and contributing to team growth and recruitment. Your work will empower teams to build scalable, high-performing, and resilient systems.

Requirements

• Strong Observability Expertise – Deep knowledge of reliability and observability concepts, including experience implementing observability in large, distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS). Hands-on experience with monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger, New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, SignalFX, Scalyr, SumoLogic, or Splunk
• Technical Leadership in Software and Infrastructure – Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C#, JavaScript, Golang, or Python
• Experience in Incident Response and Operational Excellence – Previous experience in on-call rotations and resolving production incidents in complex environments. Ability to analyze and prevent system failures through proactive reliability improvements
• Agile and Collaborative Mindset – Experience working in agile software development environments with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Ability to structure and prioritize work effectively to maximize the team’s impact
• Strong Stakeholder Engagement and Influence – Proven ability to build relationships, engage, and influence internal stakeholders across teams and disciplines. Comfortable working in a large-scale software delivery organization with a strong focus on architectural best practices
• Platform Ownership and Scalability – Experience managing and maintaining healthy observability platforms that support a large and diverse user base

Responsibilities

• Drive Observability and Engineering Excellence: Design and implement observability solutions that enhance Xero’s engineering practices, enabling teams to build more reliable software. Guide technical design, ensure adherence to architectural principles, and remove technical blockers to improve development efficiency
• Improve System Reliability and Champion Best Practices: Identify and address failure patterns to proactively enhance system reliability. Define and evolve observability and reliability standards, advocating for best practices in system instrumentation, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting. Promote automation, agile, DevOps, and CI/CD methodologies to improve software delivery speed and quality while reducing operational toil
• Support Team Growth and Recruitment: Help build and nurture a diverse and talented engineering team by participating in hiring and recruitment. Create an inclusive and collaborative environment where engineers feel empowered to innovate and succeed

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
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Income protection
• 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