Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Summary

Join Xero's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team as a Principal Engineer and help build a reliable platform for small businesses. You will act as a role model, driving business-wide processes and defining quality standards. Lead and mentor your team, fostering a culture of high performance and psychological safety. Leverage your expertise in SRE and technology to influence technical strategy and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Champion experimentation and innovation, while ensuring the health and direction of SRE at Xero. This role requires strong technical leadership, experience in software/platform engineering, and expertise in reliability concepts. Xero offers generous benefits, including paid leave, wellbeing programs, medical insurance, parental leave, and more.

Requirements

• Demonstrate knowledge, skills, and expertise of technical leadership, including driving project goals, maintaining high standards of quality, and a deep understanding of the relevant technologies, tools, and processes
• Possess a focused mindset to champion a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas and technologies through prototypes and proof-of-concept projects
• Demonstrate strong leadership and stakeholder traits, with the ability to negotiate and influence others without authority, always keeping Xero's values at heart
• Have an extremely technical background, ideally from software engineering and/or platform engineering; coupled with proven experience delivering technical initiatives in an operational, site reliability, or platform engineering capacity
• Demonstrate experience in reliability concepts like observability, capacity management, autoscaling, deployment and release safety, software strategies for reliability, fault tolerance and graceful failure
• Possess strong experience in logging, monitoring and observability of distributed systems, including troubleshooting and service level objectives
• Have experience with the implementation and support of SaaS developer tooling commonly used for observability and incident management, such as: New Relic, Sumo Logic and Pager Duty

Responsibilities

• Act as a role model and standard of excellence that supports a culture of high performance
• Drive business-wide processes and define the bar for quality and best practices
• Lift team performance through goal clarity, feedback, removal of barriers, coaching and establishing a psychologically safe inclusive team culture
• Be an expert in your space with your finger on the pulse of SRE and technology in general, devoting time to spreading knowledge widely via talks, blog posts or written documentation
• Influence the technical strategy of your group; often partnering closely with senior product and engineering leadership to ensure the health of engineering as a whole, and the overall direction of SRE at Xero
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs
• Share expertise and experience to connect and support the growth of a culture of continuous empathy towards our customers, with the ability to make architectural decisions and understand complex systems to guide teams effectively
• Be motivated to grow the talent in the team, by identifying skill gaps and ensuring there is a clear strategy to close those gaps

Preferred Qualifications

Have experience with criticality tiering, service ownership, and chaos engineering

Benefits

• Offer very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!)
• Offer 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
• Offer free medical insurance
• Offer wellbeing and sports programmes
• Offer employee resource groups
• Offer 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers
• Offer an Employee Share Plan
• Offer beautiful offices
• Offer flexible working
• Offer career development