Principal Engineer, Xero
Data Reliability
$280-325k
+ Employee share program
Office located in San Mateo, CA
Accounting software for small businesses
Open for applications
Accounting software for small businesses
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$280-325k
+ Employee share program
Office located in San Mateo, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world.
Role
Who you are
- Proven hands-on expertise and deep technical knowledge spanning both software engineering and DevOps
- Extensive experience in hands-on technical leadership positions, with multiple years of experience running PostgreSQL workloads at scale
- Previous experience modernising database workloads to PostgreSQL, running migrations from Self Hosted infrastructure to cloud managed
- Technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance. Coupled with experience leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 10x times the number of users
- Proven experience leading large complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals
- Strong communicator and the ability to influence others in a cross-functional working environment; with the ability to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at executive level
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development
What the job involves
- Xero's Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) teams own our highly scalable and reliable database platform, supporting our software engineering teams to do their best work, innovating and delivering customer value!
- We’re embarking on a migration off our own self managed cloud database platform
- The next step in our journey is to build up PostgreSQL expertise in our DRE team, with the aim to modernise critical workloads into PostgreSQL, safely and at scale
- We are looking for a talented Principal Engineer to join the Data Reliability Leadership team. You will help us achieve our goals and drive innovation through tooling and golden pathways
- Principal Engineers at Xero helps 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
- With a focus on hypothesis-driven development and an experiment-first approach, you'll have the freedom to test and validate your ideas before bringing them to life
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and other teams to deliver high-impact solutions that drive real business results
- 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
- Deliver Golden Pathway tooling - Guide the strategy and implementation of golden pathway tooling, to remove complexity and enable Xero’s Engineering Teams to innovate on top of the database platform
- 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
- 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
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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