Lead Engineer - SRE (Operational Health & Engineering Insights)

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
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 are seeking a Lead Engineer within our Engineering Health team in SRE. We are an internal tooling team managing our Engineering Insights and Operational Health systems. Our tools are used by Xero engineering teams to drive improvement, support reliability, operational excellence, continuous delivery and engineering productivity.
About the role
As a Lead Engineer you will be a key contributor to how SRE influences across Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. 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, and working closely with the Product Manager and Team Lead you'll take technical ownership of your area and contribute technical expertise and leadership to align team deliverables with wider SRE and Xero initiatives. You'll come with strong business acumen and stakeholder management capabilities, and the ability to solve cross-organisation engineering challenges.
We're looking for a highly skilled Software Engineer with strong expertise in modern continuous delivery principles; 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.

You'll lead engineering excellence by…

• Taking a multi-year approach, exhibit a high standard of technical judgement, innovation and execution to tackle open-ended problems, defining both the what and how of things to be done
• Building cross-functional relationships across the engineering 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
• 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 organisational and engineering needs into a technical vision and roadmap for your team, and being a key driver in implementing that roadmap over time
• Providing thought leadership and guidance on development best practices, continuous delivery, quality, security, scalability & performance, monitoring & alerting and documentation.

What you'll bring with you:

• Strong and proven technical delivery experience in a similar Tech Lead role
• Strong experience using software engineering to solve operational, reliability challenges and lead technical initiatives with the user front of mind
• Experience and knowledge of developer productivity and continuous delivery
• Experience with data engineering and working with a data-driven platform in a cross-functional team
• Experienced in modern best practices on DevOps, CICD, Continuous Delivery and Quality Engineering
• Experience with Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Comfortable with most of the following technologies: SQL, Snowflake, dbt, Python, Terraform, Kubernetes, Microstrategy, Git, CI/CD pipelines 
• Exposure to data integration tools (such as dbt) and any data testing tools (example dbt expectations) 

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.