Lead Engineer

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

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and that is core to driving Xero’s mission. Supporting a culture of inclusion is something we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. A part of that is to support many types of flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. So, from the moment you begin your journey with Xero, we will constantly strive to ensure you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.

How you’ll make an impact

You’ll work in collaboration with other Xeros to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster. You’ll model the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, supporting your team to grow their technical capability and improve development practices. You’ll undertake software application development on applications in our suite of products (including new ones), contributing to new or improved experiences for our customers, internal and external. You’ll contribute to the technical direction of the product group, helping grow our cross functional environment by identifying technical gaps, promoting capability growth, and championing & demonstrating modern principles and practices. You'll help build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You will be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to simplify. You’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that will release value early to solve Xero customers' problems more effectively.

• Create software - Guide technical design to ensure implementation of architecture principles and good engineering practice. Identify the technical blockers and waste that slow down the team. Work with engineering leadership and delivery teams to identify technical capabilities that need to be grown. Maintain in-depth system knowledge across all system boundaries relating to the team’s components as well as hands-on development expertise.
• Test software - Guide the quality engineering practices for your team, identifying and resolving challenges to ensure processes and tools are optimised for their context and engineers have the required knowledge and skills. Contribute to and champion Xero’s quality strategy and standards.
• Resolve issues - Recognise and solve for common patterns of failure in the team’s delivery practices, preventing future issues by improving skills, processes or tooling. Measure the cost or value of issues, and often lead incident responses and post-mortems.
• Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero's engineering standards and frameworks. Work closely with engineering leadership to apply standards to software and delivery processes.
•  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 - Champion automation of delivery processes and ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.
• Modern software and delivery practices - Be a 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.
• Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment processes.

• Live Xero’s vision and values - Keeps Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of decision-making and leadership. Communicates and helps others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translates the vision and values into day-to-day activities and behaviours.
• Communication skills - Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization. Maintains awareness and understanding of the team's vision and strategy to help make better technical decisions.
• Build relationships - Builds and maintains trust and credibility with a wide range of internal stakeholders, and supporting teams from across Xero
• Growth mindset - Demonstrates that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hard work. Can lead, coach and provide feedback to others on development plans.
• Innovation and delivery - Leads teams to innovate and deliver technology and solve customer problems through software.
• Coaching and mentorship - Role models best practice mentoring and coaching, encourages others to mentor each other and creates ways for them to do so.
• Evangelism - Promotes Xero as a great, innovative company and workplace to the wider industry.
• Work collaboratively - Empowers and promotes high performing teams.
• Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies relevant to Xero’s engineering environment.

• Expert in your area of specialisation.
• Able to experiment with new languages and tooling.
• Ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.
• Experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security, testability, and ability to make changes easily.
• Expertise in distributed systems architecture.
• Ability to lead or facilitate discussions on application design.
• Experience in leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 2-10 times the number of users.
• Able to ensure team products meet Xero's various engineering standards.
• Experience in contributing to discussions around new standards and revisions to existing ones.
• Able to act as incident coordinator in production incidents.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.

At Xero we embrace diversity and inclusion and value a #challenge mindset. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience . If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for a role at Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.