As a Lead Engineer, you will guide technical delivery, coach engineers, and ensure high-standard project execution while maintaining system integrity and quality practices.
Our Purpose
At Xero, we’re here to help supercharge small businesses. 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
This team builds compliance reporting for Xero, which is critical to Xero's bottom line. The reports service complex financial data to key end-users, including small-to-medium-sized businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers, transforming it into digestible information. Key workstreams involve implementing valuable compliance features for end-users and executing a major platform modernisation effort and standardise systems across Xero. We are seeking engineers with strong initiative and collaborative skills who can thrive in an environment that requires tackling the complexity and ambiguity of a deeply intertwined codebase.
About the Role
As a Lead Engineer at Xero, you'll be a hands-on, strategic technical leader for one of our product teams, providing guidance and coaching on delivery, testing, and performance practices. You will contribute to the technical direction of the product group, tackling open-ended problems and exhibiting a very high standard of technical judgement and innovation. This includes the opportunity to tackle and lead the technical direction on challenging projects within our complex and ambiguous, deeply intertwined codebase.
What You'll Do
- You'll model the standard for engineering excellence and support your team's technical growth and development practices. You'll also work across functions, influencing others to reach the best outcomes for Xero.
- Join an inclusive cross-functional team and collaborate with Product, Design and Engineering and work with your Engineers to deliver large projects to a very high standard, balancing speed, quality, and architectural alignment.
- Guide technical design to ensure the implementation of architecture principles and good engineering practice. Maintain in-depth system knowledge across all system boundaries relating to the team's components.
- Guide your team's quality engineering practices, identifying and resolving challenges to optimise processes and tools. Contribute to and champion Xero's quality strategy and standards.
- Recognise and solve for common patterns of failure in your team's delivery practices, preventing future issues. You'll often lead incident responses and post-mortems , and for this role, you'll participate in the team's on-call roster.
- Proactively identify and help refocus team efforts when projects are off-course or not technically feasible.
- Proactively maintain, grow, and share knowledge of development technologies used in Xero's software applications.
- Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer-facing problems. You will actively mentor and coach engineers, helping them grow toward senior roles with personalised, direct feedback.
What You'll Bring
- Technical Expertise - Proven experience as an expert in your specialisation with the ability to adopt new languages and tools. Strong experience in full-stack development with modern technology stacks. We prefer experience with our core stack of C#/.NET, React, and AWS (or similar cloud providers/tech stacks), but we are open to candidates with relevant experience who are happy to learn. Demonstrated skill in designing secure, scalable, and maintainable systems.
- Problem-Solving & Delivery - Track record of success in simplifying complex designs into scalable, flexible components. Experience leading multiple technical workstreams. Proven experience in product scaling and distributed architectures. Demonstrated ability to proactively improve engineering processes to enhance resilience, cost efficiency, and customer experience. Experienced in managing incidents and ensuring timely resolution and prevention.
- Leadership & Collaboration - Demonstrated capability to coach and mentor engineers, fostering growth and promoting best practices. Proven ability to balance strategic vision with hands-on problem-solving for local and cross-functional teams.
- Strategic Impact - Experience influencing roadmaps to align with organisational priorities and business goals. Proven ability to leverage customer and business insights to drive decisions and deliver impactful outcomes. Track record of success building strong partnerships across teams to achieve shared goals.
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, free medical insurance, 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.
Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. At Xero we embrace diversity and inclusion and value a #challenge mindset.
Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience . If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.
Xero is an NZ Immigration Accredited Employer and Rainbow Tick certified too.
Top Skills
.Net
AWS
C#
Modern Technology Stacks
React
Xero Hawthorn West, Victoria, AUS Office
Xero Melbourne (HQ) Office
Xero’s head office in Australia is in the buzzing suburb of Hawthorn, a stone’s throw from the CBD. Here, a diverse mix of Xeros work in both global and regional teams.
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