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Xero is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead its Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team based in Melbourne, Australia. You will own and drive the reliability programme, focusing on high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) testing and incident management across Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions.
You will lead a growing team (currently two engineers, expanding to four by year-end) through a critical expansion period, building a culture where reliability is embedded into the business. Your work directly impacts Xero's customer experience and operational resilience, with a target to reduce customer-detected incidents by 70–80%.
Key responsibilities include:
• Building and maturing a continuous HA/DR testing cadence, transitioning from ad hoc to reliable weekly execution
• Establishing and optimizing incident command protocols across APAC and EMEA regions with clear time-to-mitigation targets
• Closing cross-team reliability gaps between Observability, Tooling, and product engineering through structured collaboration
• Growing the team while maintaining high incident response standards and driving a reliability-first mindset
• Mentoring engineers and shaping team culture through structured onboarding, one-to-ones, and development
You will report to the Head of Engineering for Reliability and partner closely with a US-based Engineering Manager to ensure seamless global coverage and run Xero's reliability programme collaboratively.
Required experience:
• Proven SRE or infrastructure leadership experience, ideally managing incident command at scale
• Demonstrable track record building or maturing HA/DR programmes
• Strong software engineering skills; comfortable diving into code to solve reliability problems
• Fluency with AI-assisted tooling as a core capability
• Excellent stakeholder management and ability to influence peer teams without formal authority
• Comfort operating across time zones and managing distributed teams
• Passion for growing and developing engineers
The role offers flexibility to work in a way that suits your rhythm, with an expectation to join in person approximately once per quarter. Xero values agency, curiosity, and independent problem-solving, and encourages applications even if your experience isn't a perfect match.
