SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
As a Principal Engineer in Xero's Engineering Productivity team, you will partner with the engineering community to build developer-first platform tools that empower engineers to ship high-impact software faster, safer, and at scale. Your work directly shapes how thousands of engineers across Xero operate, influencing tools, practices, and culture.
You will tackle complex technical challenges across the organization, from optimizing developer workflows to scaling AI-native development practices. Rather than being assigned to a single team, you will work across the engineering landscape to identify and solve the highest-impact problems, collaborating with multiple teams and stakeholders to drive meaningful change.
The Engineering Productivity team is a specialist group within Xero's engineering organization focused on enabling the developer community through platforms and tooling. The team collaborates closely with product teams, infrastructure teams, and technical leadership to remove friction and accelerate delivery. The team operates with high trust, psychological safety, and a commitment to diverse perspectives.
Current focus areas include: Inner-Loop Mastery (supercharging local coding speed and developer experience through the Xero AI Engineering Toolkit); Frictionless Delivery (accelerating pull request reviews and environment provisioning); Unified Tooling (consolidating the developer toolchain to eliminate context switching); and Uncompromising Quality (balancing speed with engineering excellence using Tech Health Scorecards).
This is a distributed role across Australia and New Zealand. Teams are predominantly remote-first with occasional in-person gatherings to strengthen connections and tackle complex problems. On-site sessions occur 1-2 times per quarter, typically in Melbourne or Wellington/Auckland. The role offers flexible working hours and arrangements to support personal circumstances.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated expertise in DevEx, DevOps, or Platform Engineering with a proven track record of building products and platforms that engineers love to use
- Platform-as-a-product mindset: deep understanding of engineer pain points and ability to design solutions that scale elegantly
- Comfort navigating ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments; ability to thrive when roadmaps shift and requirements remain fluid
- Strong communication skills to influence and collaborate with senior technical stakeholders and executives; ability to translate complex technical concepts into compelling narratives
- Exposure to or hands-on experience with AI-native development practices, spec-driven development, or modern AI development lifecycles
- Ability to mentor and grow others through influence and example rather than authority
- Note: Xero encourages applications even if experience isn't a perfect match, hiring based on skills, passion, and unique perspective
