Principal Engineer

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world.
This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do.
We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections.
Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

About the role:

As Principal Engineer at Xero, you'll be responsible for driving engineering excellence and building global engineering teams.
This specific position will ensure a smooth integration of our recent acquisition of Syft Analytics to accelerate our mission to provide powerful insights.
Syft Analytics is the leading global cloud-based reporting, insights, and analytics platform for small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers.

Please note, due to your delivery team being based in South Africa, this position will require regular late hours.
We anticipate this to be 5pm-8pm AEST, Tue, Wed, Thu for the first 12 months of this position.
You will have full flexibility on how you structure your day, but availability for online meetings during this time is required.

How you'll make an impact:

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.
This role will own and deliver company-wide multi-year goals, leaning into your technical expertise and in-depth understanding of specific technologies and engineering principles (e.g., software, hardware, systems).
You'll design and evaluate system architectures, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance; utilising high-level programming skills in relevant languages, with a focus on best practices and design patterns.

What you'll do:

• You will act as a role model and standard of excellence that supports a culture of high performance, driving engineering-wide processes and defining the bar for quality and best practices.
  
• You'll come with strong leadership traits, with the aim to lift team performance through goal clarity, feedback, removal of barriers, coaching and establishing a psychologically safe inclusive team culture.
  
• You'll be an expert in your space with your finger on the pulse of technology, devoting time to spreading knowledge widely via talks, blog posts or written documentation.
  
• You'll influence the technical strategy of your group; often partnering closely with senior product and engineering leadership to ensure the health of product development as a whole, and the overall direction of product development.
  Additionally, day to day you'll collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs.
  
• You'll share expertise and experience to connect and support the growth of a culture of continuous empathy towards our customers, with the ability to make architectural decisions and understand complex systems to guide teams effectively.
  
• You'll be motivated to grow the talent in the team, by identifying skill gaps and ensuring there is a clear strategy to close those gaps.
  

What you'll bring:

• Proven experience in a similar software engineering position, with a focus on system architecture and design; ultimately achieving engineering excellence at scale!
• Demonstrable knowledge, skills, and expertise leading data platform engineering teams from a technical perspective.
  This will include driving project goals, maintaining high standards of quality, and a deep understanding of the relevant technologies, tools, and processes.
  
• Previous exposure of designing and building modern engineering stacks, with hands-on experience working in AWS and GCP.
  
• A focused mindset to champion a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas and technologies through prototypes and proof-of-concept projects.
  
• Strong leadership and stakeholder traits, with the ability to influence others without authority and keeping Xero's values at heart.
  

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.