Principal Engineer

Our Purpose

At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

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.

• 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 Xero-wide quality standards and enable teams to build robust, scalable, and secure solutions. Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energise the community of practice for quality.

• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Guide teams in delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience. 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. Contribute to the design of scalable systems, balancing flexibility, reliability, and performance to meet strategic objectives.

• 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. Shape thinking on DevOps culture and proactively advocate for paying down technical debt.

• Proven experience in tech leading large, complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals.
• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Strong communicator—able to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at the executive level.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development.
• Experience contributing to technical vision and advocating for engineering best practices across a portfolio.
• Skilled in developing and implementing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and determine when to address it.

Why Xero?

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, private medical insurance, gym passes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.