Principal Technical Program Manager

Summary

Join Xero as a Technical Program Manager and play a key role in delivering complex, cross-divisional product engineering initiatives. You will collaborate with various leaders, build comprehensive plans, manage risks, and ensure effective communication across teams. Leveraging your technical fluency and agile mindset, you will support product and technology teams, proactively identify technical risks, and facilitate the delivery of high-quality products. Your exceptional communication and influencing skills will be crucial in driving strategic outcomes and improving global product engineering operations. This impactful role requires expertise in collaborative program management, technical fluency, and agile methodologies. Xero offers a supportive and flexible work environment with generous benefits.

Requirements

• Be an expert at leading the building of plans for complex, multi-team execution
• Be recognized for your ability to co-create plans in a manner that enriches shared ownership
• Know how to spot risk and coordinate mitigations and be quick to respond to issues, pulling the right people together to resolve the problem
• Be comfortable to contribute in technical dialogue and be able to build a solid understanding of the technology components that comprise a product
• Be able to use your technical knowledge to detect and mitigate challenges and risks in delivering programs at Xero
• Be deeply familiar with agile concepts and be able to run programs that ensure agility principles can thrive
• Be able to influence at all levels of the organization, from pod to product and engineering leadership teams through various influencing techniques
• Be able to convert multiple perspectives into compelling recommendations to move a program forward
• Confidently communicate the state of your Initiative, both written and verbal, and be able to adapt your language and communication style to suit any audience
• Be comfortable leaning into crucial conversations
• Thrive in an ambiguous and fast-paced environment
• Take ownership and follow through on your commitments

Responsibilities

• Facilitate the delivery of Key Product Engineering Initiatives which include coordination between more than one Division or Portfolio
• Form good relationships with leaders involved in each initiative, including team leads, product managers, engineering managers, heads of product/engineering, and GMs of product and engineering
• Be accountable to make the cross-divisional work visible, ensuring that everyone understands what is required of them and by when, and that any dependencies are coordinated so that teams are rarely blocked
• This will include regular status reporting that keeps stakeholders informed of progress
• Partner directly with leaders across engineering, product management and design as necessary to deeply understand the technical design and architecture that delivers our products
• Apply this technical knowledge to support the team in understanding how the whole technology system functions together and to proactively uncover where there are technical risks, resulting from unclear dependencies, unnecessary complexity, scale or security risk
• Play a key role in ensuring that any issues are escalated to the appropriate people to remove the concern as quickly as possible
• This will include organizing and leading ‘scrum of scrum’ style sessions which include the right people to solve issues quickly
• Play a leadership role to deliver strategic outcomes that improve our global product engineering operations

Preferred Qualifications

Past experience as an engineer is an asset

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
• 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