Engineering Team Lead

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 and role

You will be managing two Security Operations Engineering teams, both key teams in Xero's Security Operations function. These teams (Defence engineering and Workspace Security) are responsible for developing tools to assist with defence, threat intel & detection monitoring and corporate security controls.

As an Engineering Team Lead for the Defence and Workspace Security teams, you will support your direct reports in becoming awesome Xeros while fostering the growth of a world-class Security Operations team. You'll maintain a working environment in which your team can do their best work sustainably and collaboratively, working closely with SecOps Response, other Security teams, Internal IT and engineering teams across the business. You'll monitor and look to support the operational health of your people and processes, aiming for resilience and continuous improvement.

You will support your team to hone their skills and grow as individuals in order to meet the capabilities required for the team. Your focus will be on driving a consistent, best-practice Security Operations team, while ensuring the team makes progress towards their goals.

What you'll do

• Maintain a positive and constructive relationship between yourself, your product peers, and your team.
• Coach, lead, and develop your people and teams to be a high performing, highly collaborative and highly engaged.
• Ensure your team's delivery pipeline is flowing at a predictable and sustainable pace, raising and addressing blockers as appropriate.
• Ensure accurate, fit for purpose and sustainable delivery systems exist in your team. You'll be responsible for your team providing informed estimates, delivery forecasting, capacity planning, and associated reporting.
• Ensure the health of all the team's products is well understood by the team, discoverable by the wider organisation, and able to be addressed, should problems occur.
• Understand and advocate the Xero Engineering Standards. Working as part of a leadership group, you'll facilitate an engineering approach that is compliant to these standards and fosters sustainably excellent engineering.
• Working with your peers in Product and your team, assist in the development roadmaps and plans which effectively and efficiently deliver business outcomes.
• Maintain a current knowledge of engineering and delivery tools used in the development of Xero's software applications.
• Work with engineers to troubleshoot and resolve production issues, where appropriate. Ensure that post-incident learnings are collected and actioned.
• Coach and enable your team toward effective and efficient delivery.
• You will support your team to hone their engineering skills and grow as individuals in order to meet the capabilities required for the team.
• Create a culture of psychological safety and inclusion. Ensure the health of your team is monitored, that all members of your team are empowered to raise ideas and concerns, and that everyone contributes to improvements in how the team works together.

What you'll bring with you

• You'll come with previous experience of managing software delivery and engineering teams using Lean and/or Agile techniques.
• You'll be a seasoned coach & mentor; understanding why and how people learn.
• You'll possess high EQ and a true growth mindset; understanding that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hard work. You'll be self aware, self regulated, motivated and empathetic, with great interpersonal skills.
• You'll have a strong understanding of the importance of Xero's Engineering standards and practices and are able to coach teams to adhere to them.

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.