Lead Engineer - Platform Elements

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

The team looks after several core build and deploy products at Xero: TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, Artifactory and more recently the infrastructure side of Github Actions. We're a highly supportive team that enjoys encouraging one another to do great things, while supporting our customers in getting their awesome work into Production.

As a platform team, we support our customers across these products and work to ensure that their path to production is as frictionless as possible. We're working on making new offerings available to our customers through these products while ensuring that things stay up to date. The Lead Engineer will work closely with the Team Lead and Product Manager to ensure that we connect the work that we're doing to the overall vision of the group and company and help us lift and sustain the performance of the team.

About the role

As a Lead Engineer (aka Tech Lead) at Xero, you will be working as a key part of one of our product teams. It is a hands on, on the tools role and you’ll be the focal point where technical decisions meet strategic thinking. Day to day, you'll support the team by providing guidance and coaching around what great delivery, testing and performance practices look like. This is an individual contributor role where you'll coach the team from a technical perspective without being a formal people manager.

We're seeking a leader with a solid technical foundation and a proven track record in technically guiding high-performing engineering teams. You’ll understand the importance of balancing product strategy and technical goals. Your success will hinge on your ability to proactively mitigate risks, evaluate solutions, and uphold the highest engineering standards. We’re looking for someone who can ignite a culture of innovation and teamwork within their pod. You will be working to coach the team and individuals’ growth, while also helping to set and drive the bigger architectural and technical vision.

What you'll bring

• Expertise in event driven architecture and microservices.
• Ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.
• Experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security, testability, and ability to make changes easily.
• Ability to lead or facilitate discussions on application design.
• Experience in leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 2-10 times the number of users.
• Able to ensure team products meet Xero's various engineering standards.
• Experience in contributing to discussions around new standards and revisions to existing ones.
• Able to act as incident coordinator in production incidents.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.

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.