Team Leader - 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.

About the team

Xero's Product SRE teams will consist of dedicated world class SRE engineers, embedded into product teams to drive enduring reliability, world class observability, and high performing services.

The Team Leader will be responsible for building the team within the product and ensure they're empowered to own and drive reliability across the product landscape; assuming responsibility for the deliverables of the embedded product SRE team.

About the role

This position requires a highly technical leader with a strong engineering background, deep experience in SRE, and a passion for building high performing teams.

As a seasoned and relentless leader, they will contribute to 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.

We're looking for established leaders who have led and grown highly technical teams. Whilst the role will focus on leading and inspiring others to do their best work, the ideal candidate would have grown up as an engineer (with intimate technical depth regarding SRE tools and automation) before embarking on their journey into leadership.

What you'll do:

• Manage the day to day deliverables of a dedicated product SRE team. These will be highly experienced Site Reliability Engineers with a strong culture of ownership, automation first, and constant quality of delivery.
• Build long term relationships with product engineering teams, ensuring everyone can deliver on system reliability with a theme of continuous improvement.
• Champion observability best practice, ensuring implementation across products to ensure fast detection of impactful events. 
• Build a culture of continuous improvement to ensure product reliability is continuously improving and impact of issues are reduced; create and actively monitor quality standards for SRE teams and report regularly on its adherence.
• Build and deliver an Error Budget culture associated with consistent breaches of SLA/SLO.
• Provide ongoing training across the business to ensure reliability requirements are well understood and incorporated into product designs.
• Create a team of empowered engineers who continuously raise the bar of quality in deliverables and outcomes for the SRE organisation.

What you'll bring:

• Proven track record in leadership roles, with the ability to inspire and empower cross-functional teams to achieve operational excellence and drive continuous improvement (ideally an extremely technical leader with strong engineering and hands-on SRE background).
• Deep and proven experience building world class embedded SRE teams in a fast growing company.
• Obsessed with delivering a high quality and highly stable customer experience.
• Passion for customer-first thinking, with a strong product mindset helping to understand and anticipate customer needs. 
• Experience of building and delivering an error budget culture associated with consistent breaches of SLA/SLO. Coupled with a 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.

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.