Lead Engineer - SRE

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

About the role:

As a Lead Engineer within the Site Reliability Engineering team at Xero, you will be a key contributor to how SRE influences across Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. Engineers and teams you work with will aspire to emulate you and the people around you will grow in capability and confidence by working with you!

You’ll be a strong communicator with the ability to influence others in a human way, and working closely with the Product Manager and Team Lead you'll take technical ownership of your area and contribute technical expertise and leadership to align team deliverables with wider SRE and Xero initiatives. You'll come with strong business acumen and stakeholder management capabilities, and the ability to solve cross-organisation engineering challenges using influence rather than authority to enact change.

We're looking for a highly skilled software engineer with strong expertise in modern SRE principles; in addition we value people with a broad set of skills, who can share their wealth of knowledge with others to drive change and growth at Xero.

About the team:

You will be joining a tooling team within Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Our team builds and integrates a collection of tools that enable teams at Xero to visualize, manage, and track incidents, incident analysis and learning and SLOs in line with Xero's reliability best practices.

As a Lead Engineer on this team, you will have the opportunity to leverage your technical expertise and leadership skills to drive continual improvement and align team deliverables with broader SRE and Xero initiatives. This role plays a crucial part of ensuring the maintenance of a reliable, robust, and observable software platform, aligned with SRE principles.

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we drive and influence Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. We are a global team based across New Zealand, Australia and the USA. In SRE at Xero, we combine software and systems engineering to enable engineers across Xero to build and support products that are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions.

We strive to maximise the impact of post incident learning across the organisation to improve the reliability and robustness of the Xero platform, while providing enablement and training across observability, reliability engineering, incident management and service ownership.

We also enable engineers across Xero through developing, supporting and integrating a collection of proprietary and off the shelf tooling to enable incident management and response, incident analysis and learning, monitoring and observability and resource ownership. We surface data and metrics, and provide detailed insights across operational health, production operations and developer productivity.

You'll lead engineering excellence by...

• Taking a multi-year approach, exhibit a high standard of technical judgement, innovation and execution to tackle open-ended problems, defining both the what and how of things to be done.
• Building cross-functional relationships across the engineering organisation, breaking down silos to influence for the best reliability outcomes for Xero
• Through curiosity and thoughtful questioning, you will engage in productive challenge, manage different viewpoints and move critical company priorities forward
• You will influence technical and engineering roadmap and strategy for your area, remaining connected to the day to day engineering challenges of your users
• Lifting team and individual performance through coaching and mentoring, goal clarity, feedback and removing barriers
• Developing a team culture of ownership through role modelling, empowerment, continuous improvement, experimentation and feedback
• Analysing complex challenges, facilitating collaborative problem solving and navigating obstacles efficiently
• Translating organisational and engineering needs into a technical vision and roadmap for your team, and being a key driver in implementing that roadmap over time
• Providing thought leadership and guidance on development best practices, continuous delivery, quality, security, scalability & performance, monitoring & alerting and documentation.

What you'll bring with you:

• Strong and proven technical delivery experience in a similar Tech Lead role
• Experience designing, building and supporting scalable, reliable, and maintainable software systems.
• Strong experience with Service Level Objectives, incident management and learning from incidents
• Experience being on-call for complex distributed systems
• You'll be well versed in modern best practices on DevOps, CICD, Continuous Delivery and Quality Engineering
• Comfortable with most of the following technologies: Python, C#, Go, Javascript with React and Redux, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, GitHub source control, GitHub Actions, TeamCity

Why Xero? 

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, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.