Xero
Technical Duty Officer / Incident Commander (SRE)
Job Summary
This role involves owning and leading incident management processes to ensure service reliability across Xero's products. The candidate will provide expert leadership during critical outages, promote SRE principles, and collaborate with teams to analyze failures and improve systems. They should have hands-on experience troubleshooting cloud services, networking, and scripting, along with strong communication skills. The position aims to build a world-class SRE culture focused on continuous learning, automation, and operational excellence.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
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.
About the team
Xero’s Incident and Problem Management team are a part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization and are responsible for the build, delivery and ongoing maintenance of robust process and tooling around Incident management.
The team is responsible for driving enduring reliability at Xero through robust, consistent and fast response to high severity incidents. They are responsible for building a world class process and ensuring that process matures as the demands of the business grows.
About the roles
These positions require experienced SRE professionals with a strong technical background, deep experience in SRE, a passion for building and delivering robust processes, and extensive experience of leading technical response to high severity cloud issues.
They will drive best practice across the business and contribute to the ongoing transformation of the Xero SRE culture. As expert communicators, they will lead technical discussions to identify and track actions associated with and identified during incident situations.
Across our SRE function, we're looking for those who are keen to deep dive into causes of incidents and proactively examine the potential causes of future incidents; working with engineering teams to remove the risk of that failure scenario. Ultimately building playbooks and automation to ensure quick and effective responses. In addition, provide ongoing training across the business to ensure the process is well understood and adhered to.
These roles will form the backbone of a new team, providing a Technical Duty Officer (TDO) function within the business. TDO’s are incident commanders who use SRE skillsets to drive fast mitigation and enduring resolution of impactful events.
- Own the incident management process, ensuring it drives enduring reliability across all products and services within Xero.
- Provide expert leadership during critical outages, coordinating multiple teams to ensure streamlined decision-making and quick resolution.
- Lead and advocate for the transformation to a world-leading SRE organization, promoting SRE principles within the Engineering Department.
- Promote a customer-focused approach by addressing and mitigating global customer environment issues, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence within the SRE team.
- Develop and implement scalable process frameworks and observability strategies to ensure rapid problem diagnosis, response, and service reliability.
- Collaborate with product teams to thoroughly analyze failures and integrate insights to improve service reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
- Previous career experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, in an Operations or Engineering environment
- Hands-on experience troubleshooting AWS hosted services
- Networking knowledge and able to troubleshoot TCP/IP, SSL/TLS, DNSSEC, IPsec, and BGP issues.
- Coding experience (preferably Python) building tools, scripting, or automation
- Strong communication (oral & written) skills including the ability to translate technical issues/concepts into agreed actions
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, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
Xero
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