Principal Engineer

Summary

Join Xero's Inventory team as a Principal Engineer and contribute to a significant upgrade of our inventory offering. You will lead initiatives spanning multiple teams, improving software creation and delivery. Responsibilities include creating and testing software, leading by example, resolving issues, establishing engineering standards, and driving continuous improvement. The role requires extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms and expertise in coaching and mentoring engineers. Xero offers a comprehensive benefits package including generous paid leave, wellbeing programs, medical insurance, parental leave, and an employee share plan.

Requirements

• Well versed with C#/.NET and modern development practices
• Able to regularly review delivery and production metrics to identify areas of improvement for product groups
• Experience in developing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and when to pay it down
• Ability to advocate for and help design automated processes and tooling that ensures products teams delivery are correct, secure, and safe to deploy
• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines

Responsibilities

• Create software - Work on initiatives that span multiple teams to improve how Xero creates and delivers software
• Guide engineering practices of teams, helping them achieve product goals via world-class engineering techniques
• Advocate for the adoption of new technology and tooling to support product requirements
• Guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs
• Ensure security and data guidelines are implemented
• Lead by example - Design and author beautiful code, driving proof of concepts and solving hard technical problems, whilst bringing along those around you on the journey
• Test software - Promote the quality engineering strategy and standards for Xero, and support teams in evolving their practices and skills to be effective and compliant
• Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams
• Energise the community of practice for quality
• Resolve issues - Focus on systemic and strategic prevention of issues by implementing practices and tooling that make world class engineering easy, and limit the scope for failure either during the development lifecycle or in production
• Engineering standards & frameworks - Be involved with the creation and promotion of Xero wide as well as portfolio level standards and frameworks
• Research industry best practice and implement as appropriate in the context of Xero
• Ensure team’s needs and feedback is represented in upcoming standards
• Continuous improvement - Proactively maintain, grow and share knowledge of development technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Collect data and quantify the effect of automation at a product group level or wider
• Ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose
• Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected
• Proactively work to prevent customer facing problems
• Modern software and delivery practices - Proactive champion of agile and delivery practices who coaches and develops others in this space in order to ensure a consistent approach to ways of working
• Working with the engineering leaders and agile practitioners to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes

Preferred Qualifications

Some exposure to PHP is great but not essential

Benefits

• Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!)
• Dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as 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