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
The Data team is responsible for driving the adoption of data driven decision making across Xero - for both our internal users and our global audience of small business owners, bookkeepers and accountants. We create, manage and deliver a wide range of data services and products including core reporting, key data dimensions, extensible and scalable analytical data processing and storage facilities, machine learning frameworks and API driven prediction services.
We are the centre of expertise for data architecture, data modelling, machine learning, ethical data usage and artificial intelligence service design. We also lead the work to raise the data and AI literacy levels across Xero.
About the Role
There's a myriad of job titles out there and the English language can only express so much in a couple of words. So role title aside, what we're looking for is someone to:
Work in a cross-functional team to conceive, design, build and operate web-scale, data driven and/or machine learning based solutions to internal and customer facing Xero business challenges.
Act as an educator and evangelist globally across the Xero business helping to raise the data and AI literacy of our workforce
Stay current with emerging practices, techniques and frameworks in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence and curate the research that is most relevant and applicable to our business problems.
Champion the ethical application of data science and machine learning and ensure that you and the team are always working with the best interests of our users in mind.
Continually build our understanding of the data we hold and the opportunities it creates for new products and new value to our users.
Feedback issues with data quality and data gaps to our Product build teams and work with them to improve the instrumentation and data coverage of our core products and services.
Drive adoption of best practice in developing modern data-driven products including approaches to design and ways of working.
Mentor and develop more junior members of our team and the wider Xero data science and machine learning community, increasing our capability to answer questions about our business with data and to build and operate intelligent, data-driven, products and services into our core customer offerings.
About You
You have 3+ years experience delivering web-scale production machine learning systems
You rejoice in identifying tough problems that can be solved with the application of scientific thinking, algorithms and analytical data processing.
You understand that solving worthwhile problems means covering all areas of the data lifecycle - finding it, understanding it, experimenting with it, despairing over it, fixing it
You're comfortable reading ML research papers, keep abreast of new work on arXiv.org and have on occasion spent your weekends tinkering around with that interesting new framework you read about recently ... but when it comes down to it, you want to solve real business problems in the simplest and most robust way possible
You're comfortable working with subject matter experts from all corners of the company to deeply understand the customer problem before getting your hands dirty with all that data and code
Experience as a hands-on practitioner building productionized machine learning pipelines which touch real human end users. (Note, we do not have any graduate roles available at this time.)
You have a solid grasp of statistics and you have wrestled with the challenges inherent in actually measuring the impact of your machine learning pipelines in the wild
You've learned through experience that it's important to write testable, repeatable code so you can debug it when something goes bump in the night
You know your way around the 'nix command line, ssh your way happily around your multiple running AWS instances and are a competent programmer in Python, Scala or similar
What You'll bring with you
Ability to translate between the business and machine learning domains
Sound software engineering skills in Python, Scala, or similar
Expert level hands on practitioner skills in one or more of: time series forecasting, natural language processing, classical machine learning, deep learning
Ability to grasp and teach the mathematical concepts that underpin the domains outlined above
Comfortable with version control and command line
Strong communication skills and the ability to tailor a message for peers, senior stakeholders, and junior team members alike
Ability to mentor and grow junior scientists
By joining Xero you'll be working in a rapidly growing global company that is making life better for people in small business, their advisors and communities around the world. We believe in inspiring people to do the best work of their lives, if you do too, then apply!
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.
