Principal Engineer, Site 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 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. 

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 strive to maximise the impact of post incident learning across the organisation to improve the reliability and robustness of the Xero platform, while providing enablement and training across observability, reliability engineering, incident management and service ownership.

About the role:

Principal Engineers at Xero helps break down silos within (and across) functions, influencing others to reach the best outcome for Xero. They build deep cross-functional relationships, facilitate the right conversations, and settle disagreements by managing different viewpoints.

With a focus on hypothesis-driven development and an experiment-first approach, you'll have the freedom to test and validate your ideas before bringing them to life. Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and other teams to deliver high-impact solutions that drive real business results.

Across our SRE function, we're looking for those who are keen to deep dive into causes of incidents and proactively examine the potential causes of future incidents; working with engineering teams to remove the risk of that failure scenario. Ultimately building playbooks and automation to ensure quick and effective responses. In addition, provide ongoing training across the business to ensure the process is well understood and adhered to.

What You'll Do:

• You'll act as a role model and standard of excellence that supports a culture of high performance. Driving business-wide processes and defining the bar for quality and best practices. 
• You'll come with strong leadership traits, with the aim to lift team performance through goal clarity, feedback, removal of barriers, coaching and establishing a psychologically safe inclusive team culture. 
• You'll be an expert in your space with your finger on the pulse of SRE and technology in general, devoting time to spreading knowledge widely via talks, blog posts or written documentation.
• You'll influence the technical strategy of your group; often partnering closely with senior product and engineering leadership to ensure the health of engineering as a whole, and the overall direction of SRE at Xero. Additionally, day to day you'll collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs.
• You'll share expertise and experience to connect and support the growth of a culture of continuous empathy towards our customers, with the ability to make architectural decisions and understand complex systems to guide teams effectively.
• You'll be motivated to grow the talent in the team, by identifying skill gaps and ensuring there is a clear strategy to close those gaps. 

What You'll Bring:

• Demonstratable knowledge, skills, and expertise of technical leadership. This will include: driving project goals, maintaining high standards of quality, and a deep understanding of the relevant technologies, tools, and processes.
• A focused mindset to champion a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas and technologies through prototypes and proof-of-concept projects.
• Strong leadership and stakeholder traits, with the ability to negotiable and influence others without authority, always keeping Xero's values at heart.
• You'll come from an extremely technical background, ideally from software engineering and/or platform engineering; coupled with proven experience delivering technical initiatives in an operational, site reliability, or platform engineering capacity.
• Demonstrated experience in reliability concepts like observability, capacity management, autoscaling, deployment and release safety, software strategies for reliability, fault tolerance and graceful failure.
• Strong experience in logging, monitoring and observability of distributed systems, including troubleshooting and service level objectives.
• Experience with the implementation and support of SaaS developer tooling commonly used for observability and incident management, such as: New Relic, Sumo Logic and Pager Duty.
• Any experience with criticality tiering, service ownership, and chaos engineering is ideal but not essential.

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.