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.
In Subscription & Billing, we collect over a billion dollars of revenue every year. Our vision is to be the billing product for Xero that scales quickly, integrates easily, enables insights while delighting customers with a beautiful self service experience.
What is a Principal Engineer at Xero?
Xero's technology vision is to "be one of the most sustainably excellent software engineering companies in the world."The Principal Engineer is a pivotal role in achieving this vision. Working across multiple teams, you will use your superior technical acumen and leadership skills to drive software delivery performance and support our engineering teams to thrive in a continuous improvement culture.
In the role of Principal Engineer, we are looking for technical leadership who want to be challenged by the modernising and re-platforming web scale systems, while also helping lead a long-term engineering culture of continuous improvement and elite performance.
What you'll do:
- Lead on defining the technical target state according to architectural standards and commodity offerings within Xero
- In collaboration with our Lead Engineers, help create and drive the technical strategy across our engineering community while surfacing the measures that show progress
- Lead initiatives to grow the technical capabilities of our engineers and evolve the technical architecture of our software in support of the product roadmap
- Establish strong relationships with supporting disciplines such as architecture, security, infrastructure and quality across Xero
- Work closely with pods, coaching/mentoring engineers to make better technical decisions
- Seek out, quantify, and collaborate on cross-cutting obstacles that hinder development teams' ability to deliver
- Work with Product Management and Product Architecture to understand solution feasibility and produce high level estimations
- Advocate for metrics collection and informed decision making
- Support implementing new tooling and processes to improve cross team performance
- Research and explore new technology to solve current and future problems
- Stay connected with the Xero engineering community to ensure we remain connected to Xero’s engineering vision
- Support the Development Manager and Team Leads in recruiting, interviewing and onboarding new team members
- Support our Lead Engineers in tackling some of our most gnarly problems
What you'll bring:
- Experience optimising engineering infrastructure with product development teams (ideally SaaS product development)
- Proven experience in technical leadership on large projects leveraging .NET, JAVA or similar
- Experience with cloud native technologies across compute, data, eventing and observability
- General Front End Application development experience e.g. JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5, React and/or other MVC/MVVM client-side frameworks such as Angular, Vue
- Experience delivery planning across multiple work streams as well as designing and operating CI/CD pipelines including compliance as code approaches to security, standards and code metrics
- Solid experience working in Agile teams, specifically facilitating technical discovery & design sessions
- Awareness of software governance across security, privacy, reliability and cost. Understanding of technical risk and mitigation strategies
- You’ll be an excellent communicator, comfortable presenting and defending ideas in a diverse environment
Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one 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. 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 this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.
Xero is an NZ Immigration Accredited Employer and Rainbow Tick certified too.