Remote Principal Engineer - SRE

Summary

Join Xero as a Principal Engineer in the Site Reliability Engineering team to lead engineering excellence, drive reliability, and influence cross-functional relationships. As a figurehead within your portfolio, you will provide leadership in how SRE influences across Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers.

Requirements

• Expertise in modern SRE principles is a fundamental requirement for this role
• Strong business acumen and stakeholder management capabilities are required
• Ability to solve cross-organisation engineering challenges using influence rather than authority is required
• Reliability and distributed systems engineering experience, including running complex systems at large scale, is required
• Strong strategic delivery experience in either software engineering or platform engineering is required
• Experience working in environments with more advanced security and networks is required
• Applying systems thinking and systems engineering to the engineering environment is required
• Advanced experience in logging, monitoring and observability of distributed systems, including troubleshooting and service level objectives, is required
• Leading incident management and response, including complex and high severity incidents; post incident reviews, incident analysis and learning from incidents, is required
• Strong hands on experience in DevOps, continuous delivery, CI/CD, automated quality and safe deploy and release at scale is required
• Experience with the implementation and support of SaaS developer tooling commonly used for observability and incident management, such as New Relic, Sumo Logic and/or PagerDuty, is required

Responsibilities

• Take a multi-year, industry leading perspective to ensure that our products are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions
• Build deep cross-functional relationships at all levels of the organisation, breaking down silos to influence for the best reliability outcomes for Xero
• Through curiosity and thoughtful questioning, engage in productive challenge, manage different viewpoints and move critical company priorities forward
• Working between multiple levels, influence technical and engineering strategy and direction while also remaining connected to the day to day engineering challenges
• Lift team and individual performance through coaching and mentoring, goal clarity, feedback and removing barriers
• Develop a team culture of ownership through role modelling, empowerment, continuous improvement, experimentation and feedback
• Analyse complex challenges, facilitate collaborative problem solving and navigate obstacles efficiently
• Translate strategy and organisational and engineering needs into a technical vision and roadmap across the domain, and be a key driver in implementing that vision over time
• Provide thought leadership and guidance on security, scalability & performance, monitoring & alerting, analytics, documentation and quality

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
• 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
• Employee Share Plan
• Beautiful offices
• Flexible working
• Career development