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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 multiple teams within a product group to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster.
You’ll help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and lead initiatives to grow the technical capabilities of engineers and evolve the technical architecture of our software in support of the product roadmap.
You’ll understand the product vision & strategy and work with product and engineering leadership to ensure technical decisions and implementations are aligned with strategic goals. You’ll lead the growth of our cross functional environment, contributing to the technical roadmap and architectural direction across the product group and wider if necessary.
You'll help teams 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.
What you'll do
- Create software - Work on initiatives that span multiple teams to improve how Xero creates and delivers software. You’ll 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.
- Test software - Promote the quality engineering strategy and standards for Xero, and support teams in evolving their practices and skills to be effective and compliant. Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energise the community of practice for quality.
- Resolve issues - Focus on systemic and strategic prevention of issues by implementing practices and tooling that make world class engineering easy, and limit the scope for failure either during the development lifecycle or in production.
- Engineering standards & frameworks - 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.
- 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 - Collect data and quantify the effect of automation at a product group level or wider. 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.
- Modern software and delivery practices - 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. Working with the engineering leaders and agile practitioners to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes.
- Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment programmes, actively engage with the external tech community, take part in external speaking engagements, and promote Xero brand.
How you'll do it
- Live Xero’s vision and values - Keeps Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of strategic 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.
- Build relationships - Establishes a high level of trust and credibility with internal and external stakeholders. Role models effective relationship building to the wider team. Ensures the team has effective relationships with supporting teams 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 and explain how this fits into the external market. Is intentional about own learning and sets clarity around learning outcomes for others.
- Innovation and Delivery - Leads teams to innovate and deliver technology across Xero and solve complex customer problems through software.
- Coaching and Mentorship - Instills and promotes a culture of learning and development within the team. Works with teams to make better technical decisions. Mentors Lead Engineers in the product areas.
- Evangelism - Introduces Xero in a positive light to an audience inside and outside the industry.
- Work Collaboratively - Influences outcomes at the highest level, moves beyond mere broadcasting, and sets best practices for others.
- Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies relevant to Xero’s current and future engineering environment
What you'll bring with you
- Able to regularly review delivery and production metrics to identify areas of improvement for product groups.
- Experience in developing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and when to pay it down.
- Ability to advocate for and help design automated processes and tooling that ensures products teams delivery are correct, secure, and safe to deploy.
- Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms.
- 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.
