Principal Engineer - SRE

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 role 

As a Principal Engineer within the Site Reliability Engineering team at Xero, you will be a figurehead within your portfolio, providing leadership in how SRE influences across Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. Leaders, engineers and teams you work with will aspire to emulate you and the people around you will grow in capability and confidence by working with you!

You’ll be a strong communicator with the ability to influence others in a human way, you will take ownership of your portfolio and guide your team to greatness. You'll come with strong business acumen and stakeholder management capabilities, the ability to solve cross-organisation engineering challenges using influence rather than authority to enact change.

We're looking for an expert and evangelist in modern SRE principles as a fundamental requirement for this role; in addition we value people with a broad set of skills, who can share their wealth of knowledge with others to drive change and growth at Xero.

About the team

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we drive and influence Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. We are a global team based across New Zealand, Australia and the USA.

In SRE at Xero, we combine software and systems engineering to enable engineers across Xero to build and support products that are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions.

We strive to maximise the impact of post incident learning across the organisation to improve the reliability and robustness of the Xero platform, while providing enablement and training across observability, reliability engineering, incident management and service ownership.

We also enable engineers across Xero through developing, supporting and integrating a collection of proprietary and off the shelf tooling to enable incident management and response, incident analysis and learning, monitoring and observability and resource ownership. We surface data and metrics, and provide detailed insights across operational health, production operations and developer productivity.

You’ll lead engineering excellence by...

• Taking a multi-year, industry leading perspective, you will ensure that our products are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions
• Building deep cross-functional relationships at all levels of the organisation, breaking down silos to influence for the best reliability outcomes for Xero
• Through curiosity and thoughtful questioning, you will engage in productive challenge, manage different viewpoints and move critical company priorities forward
• Working between multiple levels, you will influence technical and engineering strategy and direction while also remaining connected to the day to day engineering challenges
• Lifting team and individual performance through coaching and mentoring, goal clarity, feedback and removing barriers
• Developing a team culture of ownership through role modelling, empowerment, continuous improvement, experimentation and feedback
• Analysing complex challenges, facilitating collaborative problem solving and navigating obstacles efficiently
• Translating strategy and organisational and engineering needs into a technical vision and roadmap across the domain, and being a key driver in implementing that vision over time
• Providing thought leadership and guidance on security, scalability & performance, monitoring & alerting, analytics, documentation and quality

You'll come with a wide range of skills, including exposure to...

• Reliability and distributed systems engineering, including running complex systems at large scale
• Strong strategic delivery experience in either software engineering or platform engineering
• Experience working in environments with more advanced security and networks
• Applying systems thinking and systems engineering to the engineering environment
• Advanced experience in logging, monitoring and observability of distributed systems, including troubleshooting and service level objectives
• Leading incident management and response, including complex and high severity incidents; post incident reviews, incident analysis and learning from incidents
• Strong hands on experience in DevOps, continuous delivery, CI/CD, automated quality and safe deploy and release at scale
• Experience with the implementation and support of SaaS developer tooling commonly used for observability and incident management, such as New Relic, Sumo Logic and/or PagerDuty.

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, free medical insurance, 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.