Principal Engineer, Data Reliability

Our Purpose

At Xero, we’re here to help supercharge small businesses. 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

Xero's Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) teams own our highly scalable and reliable database platform, supporting our software engineering teams to do their best work, innovating and delivering customer value

We’re embarking on a migration off our own self-managed cloud database platform. The next step in our journey is to build up PostgreSQL expertise in our DRE team, with the aim to modernize critical workloads into PostgreSQL, safely and at scale.

About the role

We are looking for a talented Principal Engineer to join the Data Reliability Leadership team. You will help us achieve our goals and drive innovation through tooling and golden pathways.

Principal Engineers at Xero help 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.

What you'll do:

- Create software - Work on initiatives that span multiple teams to improve how Xero creates and delivers software. You’ll guide engineering practices of teams, helping them achieve product goals via world-class engineering techniques. Advocate for the adoption of new technology and tooling to support product requirements. Guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs. Ensure security and data guidelines are implemented.
- Deliver Golden Pathway tooling - Guide the strategy and implementation of golden pathway tooling, to remove complexity and enable Xero’s Engineering Teams to innovate on top of the database platform.
- Resolve issues - Focus on systemic and strategic prevention of issues by implementing practices and tooling that make world-class engineering easy, and limit the scope for failure either during the development lifecycle or in production. Identify and help refocus efforts when projects veer off course, ensuring results meaningfully impact customers and the business. For the Principal Engineer role, this would involve participation in the team on-call roster.
- Engineering standards & frameworks - Be involved with the creation and promotion of Xero-wide as well as portfolio-level standards and frameworks. Research industry best practice and implement as appropriate in the context of Xero. Ensure team’s needs and feedback is represented in upcoming standards. Shape thinking on DevOps culture and proactively advocate for paying down technical debt.
- Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Guide teams in delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience. Ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected. Proactively work to prevent customer-facing problems. Contribute to the design of scalable systems, balancing flexibility, reliability, and performance to meet strategic objectives.

What you'll bring with you:

- Proven hands-on expertise and deep technical knowledge spanning both software engineering and DevOps.
- Extensive experience in hands-on technical leadership positions, with multiple years of experience running PostgreSQL workloads at scale.
- Previous experience modernizing database workloads to PostgreSQL, running migrations from Self-Hosted infrastructure to cloud-managed.
- Technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance. Coupled with experience leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 10x times the number of users.
- Proven experience leading large complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals.
- Strong communicator and the ability to influence others in a cross-functional working environment; with the ability to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at executive level.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development.

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 the time of application and throughout the interview process.

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.

We offer wellbeing and sports programs, 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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