Principal Engineer

About Xero

Xero is dedicated to transforming small business operations by enhancing efficiency through advanced technology and fostering a supportive community that unlocks limitless potential. By empowering small businesses, Xero aims to contribute to building a stronger economy with global impact.

Role Impact

In the role of Principal Engineer, you will collaborate with multiple teams within the product group to create and deliver exceptional software more efficiently. You will set benchmarks for engineering excellence, evolve the technical architecture aligned with product strategies, and lead key initiatives to elevate technical capabilities across engineering. Partnering with leadership, you will shape technical strategy, dismantle organizational barriers, and drive data-informed architectural decisions to deliver scalable solutions that address complex customer challenges swiftly.

Key Responsibilities

• Champion engineering best practices across teams, promote emerging technologies and tools, and define architectural direction for the portfolio.
• Design and guide the development of cloud-native applications that emphasize scalability, reliability, and performance, balancing automation with operational health and deployment processes.
• Drive quality and reliability standards network-wide by defining service level objectives (SLOs), ensuring security, and embedding data governance across systems.
• Focus on proactive prevention of production issues through advanced tooling and engineering practices, participate in on-call rotations, and realign projects as necessary.
• Lead initiatives to manage and reduce technical debt by promoting DevOps culture and frameworks to quantify tech debt costs.
• Mentor engineers of all seniority levels to cultivate a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing environment.
• Engage in recruitment efforts, participate in interviews, and represent Xero's technical brand within and outside the company.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Extensive leadership experience delivering complex, large-scale technical projects on cloud-native platforms with demonstrated scalability and reliability achievements.
• Excellent communication skills capable of articulating complex technical concepts to both engineering teams and executive leadership.
• Proven ability to formulate strategic architectural direction aligned with long-term business goals.
• Strong problem-solving skills to break down complex issues into actionable solutions while balancing technical trade-offs pragmatically.
• Experience with frameworks that quantify and prioritize technical debt alongside feature development.
• Commitment to mentoring engineers, advancing delivery practices, and nurturing an inclusive and collaborative culture.

Company Values

• We Make it Beautiful: Encouraging bold innovation to inspire change.
• We Make it Happen: Prioritizing progress with clarity, decisiveness, and accountability.
• We Make it Human: Fostering empathy and inclusion through personal care and respectful challenges.
• We Make it Together: Building trust via transparency, diverse views, and strong partnerships.

Additional Information

Applicants are encouraged to apply even if their experience isn’t an exact match. Xero values skill sets, passion, and unique perspectives that enrich their culture and teams.