Team Leader - Observability & Tooling

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 role:

We're looking for a Team Leader to join our Observability and Tooling team. In this role, you will envision, design, and develop tools and automation that drive the adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Observability principles and best practices across our entire portfolio of services.

As a technical leader, you will lead by example—providing hands-on technical direction, mentorship, and guidance to engineers while helping to upskill the team. Your contributions will play a key role in shaping and transforming Xero’s SRE culture.

We are seeking a highly technical, hands-on leader with deep expertise in software development and a passion for SRE and Observability. This role will help define and execute the SRE tooling and platform strategy, ensuring alignment with Xero’s broader reliability goals.

The ideal candidate will bring a strong technical background and a passion for solving complex challenges with innovative solutions. You'll thrive in a fast-paced, iterative engineering environments, balancing big-picture objectives with technical execution.

Most importantly, you have a proven ability to lead, mentor, and inspire a team, creating a culture of growth, collaboration, and excellence.

About the team:

We are looking for an engineering leader to lead a small but high-performing team of passionate and talented engineers.

Your team will build and deliver tooling solutions that accelerate the adoption of Observability, SRE, and incident management best practices across Xero. By developing products that reduce toil and improve developer experience, you will help internal teams bring their ideas to market faster.

You will play an active part in shaping both the product and the team, ensuring that our solutions align with business needs and engineering excellence. You will be responsible for setting technical direction, fostering innovation, and driving continuous improvement to help Xero achieve its ambitious engineering goals.

• Lead by example – Provide hands-on technical mentorship, guiding engineers to grow their skills and adopt best practices.
• Collaborate cross-functionally – Work closely with Product Managers, Team Leads, Principal Engineers, Lead engineers and other technical leaders to align team efforts with broader SRE and company goals.
• Champion the customer experience – Ensure our tools and systems satisfy the needs of our users and enable them to detect and resolve issues proactively, delivering a seamless and self-service experience.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement – Identify opportunities to enhance our reliability, scalability, and engineering practices while promoting a growth mindset.

• Technical Leadership – Experience in managing a team, with a proven ability to inspire and motivate engineers to reach their full potential. You excel at explaining both the “why” and the “how”, ensuring clarity and alignment across the team.
• Software Engineering Expertise – Strong foundation in computer science and software engineering, with deep knowledge of software design, distributed systems, and scalable architectures.
• Strategic Planning & Execution – Skilled at planning, team building, and execution, ensuring that projects meet commitments and are delivered with predictability and high quality.
• Process & Tooling Implementation – Experience in developing tools, processes, internal instrumentation, and methodologies, with the ability to identify and resolve blockers efficiently.
• Agility & Delivery – Comfortable leading teams and projects under tight deadlines and short release cycles, maintaining focus, efficiency, and adaptability in fast-paced environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Strong product mindset and can understand and anticipate customer needs.

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.