Engineering Manager

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 role

We're looking for a highly experienced and proactive Engineering Manager who will take ownership of our critical Salesforce and AWS platforms.

This is a pivotal role that sits at the intersection of technology and business, ensuring our platforms are robust, scalable, secure, and continuously evolving to meet our ambitious goals. You'll be instrumental in executing an existing roadmap, driving operational excellence, and fostering a culture of quality and best practices.

Our ideal candidate will be a hands-on leader, with a passion for platform reliability, automation, and enabling high-performing teams.

About the team

Join Xero's Customer Platforms team, a core part of our Enterprise Technology department. We're responsible for maintaining and enhancing Xero's crucial customer-facing platforms.

Our primary focus is the Salesforce Platform, alongside a suite of integrated third-party applications, custom solutions, and various integrations that ensure a seamless experience for our customers.

• Be the incident owner: Take end-to-end accountability for incident management across our Salesforce and AWS environments within Enterprise technology, leading resolution efforts, post-mortems, and implementing preventative measures to minimise recurrence.
• Lead our operational health and engineering metrics reporting: Proactively leading, championing and ensuring accurate, insightful and strategic reporting for the operational health and engineering performance of our technology stack e.g. Salesforce Platform.
• Own our core platforms: Drive the DevOps and infrastructure strategy for our Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) platforms, ensuring optimal performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Ensure platform health and stability: Oversee platform patching schedules and meticulously manage Salesforce quarterly release cycles with your team of engineers, ensuring timely updates, thorough testing, and seamless deployment with minimal disruption.
• Champion quality and automation: Lead our quality testing efforts, with a strong focus on implementing and expanding automated testing frameworks (e.g., Playwright) to ensure robust and reliable platform functionality.
• Drive best practices: Act as the champion for platform best practices, fostering a culture of operational excellence, security-by-design, and continuous improvement across our engineering teams.
• Contribute to the future: Collaborate closely with business stakeholders and engineering teams to solve difficult tactical problems using established engineering frameworks that directly aligns with our strategic business goals and OKRs especially modernization and technical health scores.
• Unblock delivery: Proactively manage dependencies with stream-aligned product teams, ensuring seamless collaboration and removing technical blockers to accelerate the delivery of key stakeholder objectives and initiatives.
• Contribute to technical vision: Provide architectural guidance and contribute to the long-term technical vision for our Salesforce and AWS ecosystems.
• Optimise operations: Direct your team to identify and implement opportunities for automation and process improvements across platform operations.

• Proven and extensive experience in a similar Engineering Manager, Platform Manager, Lead, or equivalent role; with significant hands-on experience managing complex SaaS and cloud environments.
• You'll be a leader of leaders, with a proven ability to inspire, motivate, and develop engineering talent, fostering a collaborative and high-trust team environment.
• Deep expertise in Salesforce administration, development, release management, and best practices. Salesforce certifications highly regarded.
• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including infrastructure as code (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform), networking, security, monitoring, and cost optimisation. AWS certifications a plus.
• Solid understanding of DevOps principles and practices, including CI/CD pipelines, automation, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Proven ability to define and execute technical roadmaps, balancing strategic initiatives with operational demands.
• Exceptional collaboration and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and align diverse teams. Including excellent ability to translate technical concepts into business outcomes, and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

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 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