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Xero is seeking a Principal Engineer to drive technical excellence and architectural vision across multiple product teams. In this role, you will collaborate with engineering leadership to define engineering standards, evolve technical architecture in alignment with product strategy, and lead initiatives that expand the technical capabilities of engineers across the organization.
Key responsibilities include guiding engineering practices across teams, advocating for new technologies and tooling, and establishing portfolio-wide architectural direction. You will contribute to the design of highly scalable, reliable, and performant cloud-native applications, helping teams balance automation, performance, operational health, and deployment pipelines. You'll promote Xero-wide quality standards, guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs, and ensure security and data guidelines are embedded across systems.
You will focus on proactive prevention of production issues through robust tooling and engineering best practices, participate in on-call rotation, and help refocus projects when needed. You'll shape thinking around DevOps culture, establish frameworks to quantify technical debt costs, and drive strategic remediation efforts. A critical part of this role is mentoring and coaching engineers at all levels, creating a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing environment.
You will also participate in recruitment, engage with the external tech community, and serve as an ambassador for Xero's engineering brand. This is a strategic role requiring extensive experience leading large, complex technical initiatives on cloud-native platforms, with a proven track record of scaling for performance and reliability. You must communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and senior executives, contribute to long-term technical roadmaps, and align engineering delivery with broader business strategy.
