Lead Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering - 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.

As a Lead Engineers within the Site Reliability Engineering, (SRE), Observability team you’ll have a thorough knowledge of industry-leading observability practices and extensive hands-on experience. You’ll have a proven ability to provide strong technical mentorship, guiding engineers to upskill and enabling a focus on continual improvement. Working closely with the Product Manager, Team Lead, Principal and Lead Engineers you’ll have a product mindset and contribute your technical expertise and leadership to align team deliverables with the wider SRE and Xero initiatives. 

You’ll help to adapt and grow observability at Xero, informed by a strong understanding of systems and reliability engineering and modern SRE principles. You’ll drive uplift in observability at Xero, paving the way for engineering teams to adopt Open Telemetry. You’ll be a strong advocate for the customer while contributing to the technical direction and roadmap for SRE products. You’ll model a growth mindset and help improve our services by identifying gaps, promoting capability growth, discovering technical solutions to business problems and championing modern practices. 

• Design systems to improve adoption of Xero's observability tools with a strong focus on reducing toil in managing our monitoring and logging platforms.
• A strong focus on developing and growing engineers through technical mentoring and coaching. Provide leadership around observability standards and practices.
• Create systems that support and enable our product teams to uplift their observability practices.Improve the implementation of system instrumentation as and when required.
• Be a key member of the pod leadership, contributing to technical strategy, feasibility, backlog management and enabling delivery.
• Participate with on-call roster.
• Empower other engineering teams at Xero to achieve a high standard of system awareness so they can create efficient, scalable and reliable applications for Xero's customers.

• Experience with agile software development methodology including continuous integration and delivery.
• An understanding of how solutions architecture or architecture design works in a large software delivery organization.
• Experience building and implementing observability with large distributed cloud environments (ideally AWS).Excellent knowledge of reliability and observability concepts and practices.
• An understanding of Open Telemetry and how it works.
• Experience being on call and helping to resolve production incidents in a complex environment.
• Experience in instrumenting applications and integrating with monitoring solutions like New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, SignalFX, Scalyr, Sumo Logic or Splunk (ideally New Relic).Proficiency in one or more object-oriented programming languages such as C#, JavaScript, Golang, Python etc. Experience with DevOps tooling, eg. Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, IaC, CICD tools.
• The ability to help structure work to make optimal use of the team’s resources.
• The ability to set quarterly and annual objectives for the team in collaboration with the Product Manager and Team LeadProven ability to engage, influence and build relationships with internal stakeholders.
• Experience in managing and maintaining healthy observability platforms for a large user base.

Why Xero? 

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. 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, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.

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.