Principal Engineer

Summary

Join Xero and help create and deliver beautiful software faster by collaborating with multiple teams. You will define engineering excellence standards, lead initiatives to grow engineers' technical capabilities, and evolve software architecture. Align technical decisions with strategic goals, lead a cross-functional environment, and contribute to the technical roadmap. Build and manage software solving engineering problems at scale, seeking clarity in complexities and making data-driven decisions. This role involves creating and testing software, delivering infrastructure in a production environment, and establishing engineering standards and frameworks.

Requirements

• Proven experience in tech leading large, complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals
• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance
• Strong communicator—able to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at the executive level
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development
• Experience contributing to technical vision and advocating for engineering best practices across a portfolio
• Skilled in developing and implementing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and determine when to address it

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
• Promote Xero-wide quality standards and enable teams to build robust, scalable, and secure solutions
• Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams
• Energise the community of practice for quality
• Guide teams in delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience
• 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
• Contribute to the design of scalable systems, balancing flexibility, reliability, and performance to meet strategic objectives
• 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
• Shape thinking on DevOps culture and proactively advocate for paying down technical debt

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
• Private medical insurance
• Gym passes
• Employee resource groups
• 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers
• An Employee Share Plan
• Beautiful offices
• Flexible working
• And many other benefits that reflect our human value