Staff / Lead Engineer, Xero
Reporting Team
CA$186-236k
More information about location
Accounting software for small businesses
Be an early applicant
Accounting software for small businesses
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$186-236k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world.
Role
Who you are
- Deep experience in backend, platform, or product engineering at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment
- A track record of setting technical direction across a team, domain, or complex problem space
- Experience leading significant initiatives through ambiguity and delivering durable outcomes in production
- Strong architectural judgement and the ability to simplify complex systems
- Experience with data-heavy or analytics-oriented systems, with a strong focus on performance, correctness, and trust
- A hands-on approach to code, design, technical investigation, and production problem-solving
- The ability to communicate clearly and build alignment across engineering, product, design, and platform teams
- A genuine interest in coaching Senior Engineers and lifting capability beyond your own work
- Curiosity about emerging product experiences, including AI-enabled workflows, and how to support them responsibly
- Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team. We are also tech stack agnostic, so please apply if you've worked with adjacent technologies
What the job involves
- This is a hands-on Lead Engineer role in Xero’s Reporting team
- You’ll set technical direction for one of the most-used parts of our product and help the team make good decisions through complex, ambiguous work
- You’ll lead significant technical outcomes from early thinking through to production
- That means balancing customer needs and delivery pace with the long-term health of the systems behind Reporting, while staying close to the code
- This isn’t a people-management role. You’ll lead through technical judgement, clear communication, hands-on contribution, and by helping other engineers do their best work
- Your work will influence how small businesses and their advisors understand performance, complete reporting and compliance tasks, and get to the right answers faster
- You’ll join Xero’s Reporting group, which builds experiences customers rely on to understand their numbers, share insights, and support important accounting workflows
- You’ll work closely with engineers, product managers, designers, principal engineers, and platform teams
- A big part of the role is turning ambiguity into a practical path forward, aligning people across teams, and keeping important work moving
- Setting technical direction across Reporting, balancing customer outcomes, delivery needs, and system health
- Leading complex initiatives from discovery and design through rollout and production learning
- Guiding the modernisation of the reporting platform to improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed
- Strengthening how Reporting works with shared data and platform capabilities across Xero
- Shaping architecture, APIs, and system boundaries for complex reporting problems
- Staying hands-on through code, technical spikes, design reviews, debugging, and incident response
- Identifying risks and dependencies early, and helping teams make clear, pragmatic trade-offs
- Coaching Senior Engineers and raising the quality of technical decisions and engineering practices
Our take
For a long time, high-quality financial services have been reserved for large-scale businesses. Xero solves this problem by giving small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers access to best-in-class finance and accounting solutions.
Xero is one of the largest companies of its kind, with its promise to save time and effort for small business owners - who often don’t have in-house accounting teams - capturing interest and allowing the company to scale. It has a strong rival in Intuit QuickBooks, which offers similar services, but competes by being most effective for growing startups, and having an incredibly simple user experience.
A series of acquisitions and partnerships, including the purchase of Instafile in 2018, have consolidated Xero’s market share. The company continues to add new integrations, such as with Vehocheck Workshop Manager, and the 2023 launched Beautiful Business Fund that will help small businesses accelerate growth.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Te Aro, Wellington, Wellington
Leadership
Prior to Xero, she founded Boardlist and Joyus. She also served as the CEO of Polyvore and as a President of Asia Pacific and Latin America Operations at Google.
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