Lead Engineer

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 Bills Product team is responsible for a core feature that helps a large portion of our customers create, edit, approve, and manage their bills and payments. We handle billions of documents every month, combining innovation with a commitment to moving quickly and safely. The team is made up of thoughtful and collaborative engineers, designers, and product owners who work hard, enjoy what they do, and head home at the end of the day.

As a Lead Engineer (Tech Lead) at Xero, you’ll play a key role in one of our product teams. This is a hands-on role where you’ll balance technical expertise with strategic thinking, guiding the team through complex technical decisions and collaborations with adjacent teams. Day to day, you’ll provide mentorship and coaching to ensure best practices in delivery, testing, and performance.

This role also offers a clear pathway to grow into positions such as Principal Engineer or Architect, as you demonstrate the ability to inspire and lead the broader organization toward engineering excellence

How You'll Make Impact:

• Youʼll work in collaboration with other Xeros to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster. Youʼll model the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, supporting your team to grow their technical capability and improve development practices.
• Youʼll undertake software application development on applications in our suite of products (including new ones), contributing to new or improved experiences for our customers, internal and external. Youʼll contribute to the technical direction of the product group, helping grow our cross functional environment by identifying technical gaps, promoting capability growth, and championing & demonstrating modern principles and practices.
• You'll help build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You will be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to simplify. Youʼll be able to make data-driven decisions that will release value early to solve Xero customers' problems more effectively. 

What You'll Do:

• Create software - Guide technical design to ensure implementation of architecture principles and good engineering practice. Identify the technical blockers and waste that slow down the team. Work with engineering leadership and delivery teams to identify technical capabilities that need to be grown. Maintain in-depth system knowledge across all system boundaries relating to the teamʼs components as well as hands-on development expertise.
• Test software - Guide the quality engineering practices for your team, identifying and resolving challenges to ensure processes and tools are optimized for their context and engineers have the required knowledge and skills. Contribute to and champion Xeroʼs quality strategy and standards.
• Resolve issues - Recognize and solve for common patterns of failure in the teamʼs delivery practices, preventing future issues by improving skills, processes or tooling. Measure the cost or value of issues, and open lead incident responses and post-mortems.
• Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero's engineering standards and frameworks. Work closely with engineering leadership to apply standards to software and delivery processes.
• Continuous improvement - Proactively maintain, grow and share knowledge of development technologies used in the development of Xeroʼs soware applications.
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Champion automation of delivery processes and ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.
• Modern software and delivery practices - Be a proactive champion of agile and delivery practices who coaches and develops others in this space in order to ensure a consistent approach to ways of working.
• Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment processes. 

What Success Looks Like:

• Live Xeroʼs vision and values - Keeps Xeroʼs vision and values at the forefront of decision-making and leadership. Communicates and helps others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translates the vision and values into day-to-day activities and behaviours. 
• Communication skills - Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization. Maintains awareness and understanding of the team's vision and strategy to help make better technical decisions. 
• Build relationships - Builds and maintains trust and credibility with a wide range of internal stakeholders, and supporting teams from across Xero. 
• Growth mindset - Demonstrates that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hard work. Can lead, coach and provide feedback to others on development plans.
• Innovation and delivery - Leads teams to innovate and deliver technology and solve customer
• problems through soware. 
• Coaching and mentorship - Role models best practice mentoring and coaching, encourages
• others to mentor each other and creates ways for them to do so. 
• Evangelism - Promotes Xero as a great, innovative company and workplace to the wider
• industry. 
• Work collaboratively - Empowers and promotes high performing teams. 
• Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies
• relevant to Xeroʼs engineering environment.

What You'll Bring with you:

• Expert in your area of specialization.
• Able to experiment with new languages and tooling. 
• Ability to make code design decisions for all teamsʼ products. 
• Experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security,
• testability, and ability to make changes easily. 
• Expertise in distributed systems architecture. 
• 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?

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, and that includes our candidates. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience, but you could be just the right person for this role. If you are excited about working at Xero, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway.

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 and dental reimbursement with vision allowances, a healthcare spending account, fertility and family forming financial support, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with shared meals, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.