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 Team:
Put simply, here in Payments, Billing and Automation (PBA), we are focused on saving time and improving cash flow for our customers. Our vision to make Xero the best employee a business ever had.
For some of our teams, their purpose is to suck time out of accounting and bookkeeping workflows. For others, it's about making sure as a business you always get paid.
So what's the Engineering challenge?
The PBA group includes some of the most heavily used workflows across the Xero platform. Features like Bank Reconciliation, Invoicing and Quotes are used by millions of customers daily meaning small gains and optimisations have an exponential positive impact on people's work. Our current work streams include a mix of large application modernisation, green-fields research, experimentation, and machine-learning based optimisation of well established foundational workflows. In supporting these roadmaps, our teams use a spectrum of technologies and architectures ranging from traditional compute and relational data stores through to serverless event-driven approaches.
In the role of Principal Engineer, we are looking for technical leadership who want to be challenged by the modernising and replatforming web scale systems, while also helping lead a long-term engineering culture of continuous improvement and elite performance.
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.
What does that look like day to day?
Every day in this role will bring different challenges, but the key areas of your job is to champion engineering practices that will help the delivery team to build quality software and deliver customer value.
Collaboration
- Collaborate with Team Leads, senior developers and quality coaches to define technical practices for the pod
- 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.
Technical
- Define ways to measure the maturity of the teams engineering practices.
- 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
Technology/Operations
- 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.
What technical experience do you need for this role?
- 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
But why work at Xero?
At Xero, we are rewiring the small business economy and want millions of small businesses to thrive through beautiful software, advice, and connections.
We see the value in work-life balance, many of us take full advantage of our flexible working arrangements, so whether you like to get a surf in before work, like to head home in time to pick up the kids or you just like working from the comfort of your own home now and then, we want to support you.
We trust you to build your career to the best of your ability and we will support your hunger to learn with training and career mentorship, to help you flourish. Our facilities and PX teams work hard to give us great workspaces with all the tech company perks so join us and experience our awesome culture!
Xero is an NZ Immigration Accredited Employer and Rainbow Tick certified too.
Please include a cover letter in your application, telling us why you're a great fit for this position.
