Principal Software 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.

How You'll Make Impact:

• You’ll work in collaboration with multiple teams within a product group to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster.
• You’ll help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and lead initiatives to grow the technical capabilities of engineers and evolve the technical architecture of our software in support of the product roadmap.
• You’ll understand the product vision & strategy and work with product and engineering leadership to ensure technical decisions and implementations are aligned with strategic goals. You’ll lead the growth of our cross functional environment, contributing to the technical roadmap and architectural direction across the product group and wider if necessary.
• You’ll break down silos within and across functions, facilitating conversations and resolving disagreements while maintaining alignment with Xero’s goals. You’ll influence group-level technical strategy, partner with senior leaders to shape product development, and transcend organizational boundaries to identify and leverage opportunities.
• You'll help teams build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You will be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to simplify.
• You’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that will release value early to solve Xero customers' problems more effectively.

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.
•  Test software - Promote Xero-wide quality standards and enable teams to build robust, scalable, and secure solutions.. Identify and implement initiatives that li the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energize the community of practice for quality. 
• 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. 
• Continuous improvement - Proactively maintain, grow and share knowledge of development technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications. 
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Guide teams in delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience. Ensured employment 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. 
• Modern software and delivery practices - Proactive champion of agile and delivery practices who coaches and develops others in this space in order to ensure a consistent approach to ways of working. Working with the engineering leaders to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes. 
•  Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment programs, actively engage withthe external tech community, take part in external speaking engagements, and promote Xero brand.

How You'll Do It:

•  Live Xero’s vision and values - Keeps Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of strategic decision-making and leadership. Communicates and helps others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translates the vision and va