Lead Site Reliability Engineer (Observability)

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.

About the team

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we drive and influence Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. We are a global team based across New Zealand, Australia and the USA. 

We combine software and systems engineering to enable engineers across Xero to build and support products that are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions.

Our team builds and implements sophisticated monitoring and remediation toolsets to  support best in class observability, reliability, operational excellence and engineering productivity at Xero.

About the role

We’re looking for a Lead Engineer to help drive our observability strategy and uplift our engineering capabilities. This role will take ownership of shaping observability at Xero, driving the adoption of OpenTelemetry and modern solutions to empower teams in building reliable, high-performing services.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, where you’ll use your expertise to shape the way we monitor, measure, and improve our systems reliability and performance. Your work will have a lasting impact, empowering teams to build scalable, high-performing, and resilient systems.

This role offers the opportunity to lead by example, providing hands-on technical mentorship and guiding engineers to develop their skills and adopt best practices.

Cross-functional collaboration is essential, requiring you to work closely with Product Managers, Team Leads, Principal Engineers, and other technical leaders to align team efforts with broader SRE and company goals. A strong focus on the customer experience will be paramount, ensuring our observability systems enable teams to proactively detect and resolve issues, delivering a seamless and self-service experience for Xero's users.

What you'll do:

• Drive Observability and Engineering Excellence: Design and implement observability solutions that enhance Xero’s engineering practices, enabling teams to build more reliable software. Guide technical design, ensure adherence to architectural principles, and remove technical blockers to improve development efficiency.
• Improve System Reliability and Champion Best Practices: Identify and address failure patterns to proactively enhance system reliability. Define and evolve observability and reliability standards, advocating for best practices in system instrumentation, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting. Promote automation, agile, DevOps, and CI/CD methodologies to improve software delivery speed and quality while reducing operational toil.
• Support Team Growth and Recruitment: Help build and nurture a diverse and talented engineering team by participating in hiring and recruitment. Create an inclusive and collaborative environment where engineers feel empowered to innovate and succeed.

What you'll bring:

• Strong Observability Expertise – Deep knowledge of reliability and observability concepts, including experience implementing observability in large, distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS). Hands-on experience with monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger, New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, SignalFX, Scalyr, SumoLogic, or Splunk.
• Technical Leadership in Software and Infrastructure – Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C#, JavaScript, Golang, or Python. 
• Experience in Incident Response and Operational Excellence – Previous experience in on-call rotations and resolving production incidents in complex environments. Ability to analyze and prevent system failures through proactive reliability improvements.
• Agile and Collaborative Mindset – Experience working in agile software development environments with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Ability to structure and prioritize work effectively to maximize the team’s impact.
• Strong Stakeholder Engagement and Influence – Proven ability to build relationships, engage, and influence internal stakeholders across teams and disciplines. Comfortable working in a large-scale software delivery organization with a strong focus on architectural best practices.
• Platform Ownership and Scalability – Experience managing and maintaining healthy observability platforms that support a large and diverse user base.

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.