Head of Engineering, Product 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.

Xero’s Head of Product SRE will assume responsibility for the delivery of the embedded product SRE strategy. This strategy delivers dedicated teams of world class SRE engineers who are embedded into product teams to drive enduring reliability, world class Observability and high performing services. The leader will be responsible for building the teams across Xero landscape and ensure the teams are empowered to own and drive reliability across the product landscape. 

This position requires a strategic leader with a strong technical background, deep experience in SRE and a passion for building high performing teams. As a seasoned and relentless leader, they will drive the company's Product SRE strategy and contribute to the ongoing transformation of the Xero SRE culture. As an expert communicator, this leader will manage change and ensure the value of robust systems is communicated clearly across the business.

What You'll Do:

• Build dedicated product SRE teams of highly experienced Site Reliability Engineers globally who will take ownership of reliability. Builds a long term strategy to ensure system reliability is maintained and toil is reduced as the company goes through rapid change and growth.
• Builds a culture of automation first and ensures quality delivery at all times.
• Has experience of building and delivering an Error Budget culture associated with consistent breaches of SLA/SLO.
• Has Observability best practice is implemented across products to ensure fast detection of impactful events. Builds a culture of continuous improvement to ensure product reliability is continuously improving and impact of issues are reduced.
• Provides ongoing training across the business to ensure reliability requirements are well understood and incorporated into product designs.
• Creates and actively monitors quality standards for SRE teams and reports regularly on its adherence.

What You'll Bring With You:

• Has led and grown a global team.
• Extremely technical leader with strong engineering and hands-on SRE background.
• Deep and proven experience in building world class embedded SRE teams in a fast growing company.
• Proven track record in leadership roles, with the ability to inspire and empower cross-functional teams to achieve operational excellence and drive continuous improvement.
• Has a strong product mindset and can understand and anticipate customer needs. Obsessed with delivering a high quality and highly stable customer experience. Drives a culture of customer-first thinking.
• 24/7 focus on incident response and remediation.
• Broad and deep technical understanding of modern cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their incident and problem management practices, particularly high-growth, high-availability SaaS-based transactional systems.
• Is highly data and analytically driven.
• Has a strong technical background - ideally grew up as an engineer and has intimate technical depth regarding SRE tools and automation.

Why Xero? 

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. 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, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.

Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience. If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.