Principal Engineer - Inventory

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 and role

You’ll be working in the Inventory area of Xero. We are a fast paced, global team, working to uplift and re-vitialise our inventory offering at Xero.  We have engineers in both New Zealand and America, so being open to travel will be key for this role.

We are doing a large uplift in our legacy stack, coordinating with a wide range of other teams within Xero. You’ll be on the forefront of these communications, coordinating some of the most complex changes to our Xero Product that Xero has seen in years.

Beyond project work, you’ll seek opportunities to enhance our processes and support the professional growth of our engineers across 5 teams. In this role, you won’t be on your own. You’ll help lead Lead Engineers and you’ll have support from a community of other Principal Engineers. You’ll also work closely with the Engineering Manager, Head of Product, Team Leads and Product Managers, ensuring that we deliver the right solutions, in the right way, on schedule.

• 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.
• Lead by example - Design and author beautiful code, driving proof of concepts and solving hard technical problems, whilst bringing along those around you on the journey.
• Test software - Promote the quality engineering strategy and standards for Xero, and support teams in evolving their practices and skills to be effective and compliant. Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energise the community of practice for quality.
• 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. 
• 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. 
• Continuous improvement - Proactively maintain, grow and share knowledge of development technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications. 
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment - Collect data and quantify the effect of automation at a product group level or wider. Ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected. Proactively work to prevent customer facing problems. 
• Modern software and delivery practices - Proactive champion of agile and delivery practices who coaches and develops others in this space in order to ensure a consistent approach to ways of working. Working with the engineering leaders and agile practitioners to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes. 

• Well versed with C#/.NET and modern development practices
• Some exposure to PHP is great but not essential
• Able to regularly review delivery and production metrics to identify areas of improvement for product groups.

• Experience in developing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and when to pay it down.

• Ability to advocate for and help design automated processes and tooling that ensures products teams delivery are correct, secure, and safe to deploy.

• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.

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.