Senior Engineer - Data Reliability

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 Data Reliability Engineer, you will make an impact by applying your engineering skills to consult with product teams on their architecture decisions, solving complex problems on the fly and leading a culture of continuous improvement.

If you enjoy flexibility in the way you work, and diving into difficult engineering problems while having the freedom to solve them creatively, this is the role for you. 

About the team:

The Data Reliability team provides real time support to Xero’s customer facing applications and now, as we scale up Xero’s data platforms, have started developing world class tooling too. CASH pod specifically is a newly formed consultancy pod, servicing southern hemisphere products at Xero. We have taken the traditional responsibilities of DBAs, centralised them to one pod, and proactively engage with all areas of Xero to ensure we are building for scale and best practice.

On top of the proactive engagements, we have an incident response element, where we are called in to resolve issues with the Xero platform. This pod is a combination of 3 domains, who have consolidated to streamline process and resources. We have engineers across Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, Melbourne and Canberra (mostly hybrid). Our PM is based remotely in the Gold Coast and our Team Lead is Wellington based.

What you'll bring with you:

• 3-5 years of database experience with Highly-available cloud data platforms, ideally AWS, with a focus on relational databases (SQL Server, Postgres) + backing highly concurrent customer-facing applications
• Experience using logging and monitoring solutions e.g. DPA, New Relic, Sumo Logic.
• Experience with NoSQL variants optional.
• An understanding of technical debt from an application and database perspective.
• Experience with database schema deployment tools/products/mechanisms.
• Self driven, pragmatic, desire to solve hard scalability problems. Strong ownership ethic.
• Ability to ask questions and identify efficiencies + innovations to our existing ways of working.
• Curious by nature
• Involvement in an Incident Response process.
• Able to work under pressure in highly collaborative business-critical situations
• Able to share learnings through presentations, documentation and informative team updates
• Able to communicate at a range of technical and non-technical levels.
• Use of workflow management products such as Jira that contributes to the capture of high quality operational data
• Able to participate in an on-call roster.

What you'll do:

• Consult teams through constructive input into architectural decisions and technical guidance.
• Apply your skills to understand and address the challenges faced by our internal customers, and help them ensure their products are optimised for scale and reliability.
• Resolve issues - Triage and solve development and production issues, and be able to quickly track down the root cause.
• Communicate the impact of the problem to stakeholders in terms of business value, helping to set a priority for the resolution.
• Actively participate in incident response.
• Continuous improvement - Maintain knowledge of current and emerging database technologies and methodologies.
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Maintain and monitor delivery processes. Ensure systems are running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.
• Modern delivery practices - Practise agile ceremonies with occasional facilitation. Proactively work to improve team processes.

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.