Lead Data Engineer

Our Purpose At Xero, we're here to help you supercharge your business.
We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps.
When that happens, we're not only making life better for small business, we'll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
About the team You'll be part of the Xero Practice Tools team, a critical component of Xero's accounting operational system.
We build and maintain the starting point and primary workspace for our accountant and bookkeeping customers, empowering them to manage their practices efficiently.
About the role As a Lead Data Engineer, you'll make a significant impact by applying your deep engineering expertise to solve complex scalability and reliability challenges.
You will consult with product teams on their architecture decisions, lead a culture of continuous improvement, and have the freedom to creatively tackle difficult engineering problems.
If you thrive in a flexible work environment and enjoy diving into intricate technical issues, this role is for you.
What you'll do Lead database solutions: Design, implement, and maintain high-availability, secure SQL Server databases, including managing replication, clustering, mirroring, and backup/recovery processes.
Optimize and maintain: Develop, optimize, and maintain complex SQL queries, stored procedures, and indexing strategies to ensure peak performance and reliability for our products.
Drive technical improvements: Analyze and resolve challenges within our systems and for internal customers, shaping database strategies and driving technical enhancements.
Ensure system health: Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and maintain and monitor delivery processes to proactively prevent customer-facing problems.
This includes participating in an incident response process and an on-call roster, triaging issues, and communicating their impact to stakeholders.
Collaborate and guide: Consult with product teams by providing constructive input into architectural decisions and technical guidance.
Champion best practices: Implement and enforce database standards, security policies, and compliance requirements.
Utilize workflow management tools like Jira to capture high-quality operational data.
Mentor and share knowledge: Guide and mentor other engineers, sharing learnings through coaching, presentations, documentation, and team updates.
Innovate and improve: Maintain knowledge of current and emerging database technologies, identify efficiencies, and contribute to the continuous improvement of team processes and modern delivery practices, including agile ceremonies.
What You'll Bring With You Deep and Extensive Experience: A substantial track record (around 15+ years) in software development, demonstrating profound expertise and leadership in the architecture, hands-on design, implementation, and ongoing management of large-scale, complex database systems.
SQL Expertise: At least 5 years of recent, in-depth experience with Microsoft SQL.
Cloud Proficiency: Demonstrated success in implementing highly available, multi-region cloud-based applications, with a strong preference for experience in AWS and Azure.
Database Optimisation Skills: Strong knowledge of database design, indexing, query optimization, performance tuning, and experience with logging and monitoring solutions (e.g., DPA, New Relic, Sumo Logic).
Problem-Solving & Ownership: Excellent problem-solving skills, a proactive approach to performance improvements, a strong ownership ethic, and a pragmatic desire to solve hard scalability problems.
Technical Debt Understanding: A solid understanding of technical debt from both application and database perspectives.
Automation & Deployment: Experience designing and maintaining automated database deployment pipelines.
Collaboration & Communication: Strong communication and collaboration abilities within multidisciplinary teams, with the ability to ask pertinent questions and identify innovations.
Experience with No SQL variants will be considered an advantage.
Relevant industry certifications are highly regarded.
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.
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