Principal Software Engineer, Data Reliability - Xero

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer, Data Reliability
Job Location: San Mateo, US
Job Listing URL: https://jobs.lever.co/xero/89255f8a-3843-4b65-952a-27d5000ecdc1
Job Description: 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.

The Data Reliability Engineering team at Xero runs our highly scalable and reliable database platform, while also supporting our engineering teams to innovate and deliver customer value on top of the database platform. This year, we’re embarking on a migration off our own self managed cloud database platform onto leveraging cloud managed database offerings. The next step in our journey is to build up PostgreSQL expertise in the Database Reliability team and modernise our business critical workloads into PostgreSQL, safely and at scale. We are looking for a talented Principal Software Engineer to join the Data Reliability Leadership team, and help us achieve these goals, while also helping us drive innovation over the database platform through tooling and golden pathways.
How You'll Make Impact:
You’ll work in collaboration with multiple teams within a product group to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster.
Work closely in the leadership team to build the longer term Data Reliability and Application Data Platform technical startegy.
Work closely with the Data Reliability Team in running experiments on modernising workloads to Postgres safely, and then embark on a wider modernisation programme to modernise business critical database workloads safely and at scale.
Demonstrate proficiency in programming and assisting lead to senior level software engineers with coding and code review. Work on data quality assurance related initiatives, implementing data validation, quality checks and ensuring accuracy and reliability of Xero’s backend systems and data. You’ll help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and lead initiatives to grow the technical capabilities of engineers and evolve the technical architecture of our software in support of the product roadmap.
You’ll understand the product vision & strategy and work with product and engineering leadership to ensure technical decisions and implementations are aligned with strategic goals. You’ll lead the growth of our cross functional environment, contributing to the technical roadmap and architectural direction across the product group and wider if necessary.
You’ll break down silos within and across functions, facilitating conversations and resolving disagreements while maintaining alignment with Xero’s goals. You’ll influence group-level technical strategy, partner with senior leaders to shape product development, and transcend organizational boundaries to identify and leverage opportunities.
You'll help teams build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You will be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to simplify.
You’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that will release value early to solve Xero customers' problems more effectively.
What You'll Do:
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.
Deliver Golden Pathway tooling - Guide the strategy and implementation of golden pathway tooling, to remove complexity and enable Xero’s Engineering Teams to innovate on top of the database platform.
Test software - Promote Xero-wide quality standards and enable teams to build robust, scalable, and secure solutions.. Identify and implement initiatives that li the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energize 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. Identify and help refocus efforts when projects veer off course, ensuring results meaningfully impact customers and the business. For the Principal Engineer role this would involve participation in the team on-call roster.
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. Shape thinking on DevOps culture and proactively advocate for paying down technical debt.
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 - Guide teams in delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience. Ensured employment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected. Proactively work to prevent customer facing problems. Contribute to the design of scalable systems, balancing flexibility, reliability, and performance to meet strategic objectives.
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 to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes.
Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment programs, actively engage withthe external tech community, take part in external speaking engagements, and promote Xero brand.
How You'll Do It:
Live Xero’s vision and values - Keeps Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of strategic decision-making and leadership. Communicates and helps others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translates the vision and values into day-to-day activities and behaviors.
Documentation & Reporting - Demonstrates capability to document processes, architectures, incidents, clearly for the future, compliance and others reference.
Communication skills - Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization.
Build relationships - Establishes a high level of trust and credibility with internal and external stakeholders. Role models effective relationship building to the wider team. Ensures the team has effective relationships with supporting teams across Xero.
Elevate Capability - li team performance through goal clarity, feedback, removal of barriers, and establish psychologically safe, inclusive environments where teams can experiment, learn, and thrive.
Growth mindset - Demonstrates that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hard work. Can lead, coach and provide feedback to others on development plans and explain how this fits into the external market. Is intentional about own learning and sets clarity around learning outcomes for others.
Innovation and Delivery - Leads teams to innovate and deliver technology across Xero and solve complex customer problems through software.
Coaching and Mentorship - Instills and promotes a culture of learning and development within the team. Create a culture of excellence by coaching Lead Engineers. They tailor coaching to individual working styles and provide constructive feedback
Work Collaboratively -Influences outcomes at the highest level, moves beyond mere broadcasting, and sets best practices for others.
Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies relevant to Xero’s current and future engineering environment.
What You'll Bring With You:
Proven experience in tech leading large, complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals.
Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
Strong communicator—able to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at the executive level.
Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development.
Experience contributing to technical vision and advocating for engineering best practices across a portfolio.
Skilled in developing and implementing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and determine when to address it.
Ability to advocate for and design automated processes and tooling that ensure product delivery is correct, secure, and safe to deploy.
Proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.
Strong problem-solving skills, simplifying complex technical challenges into clear, actionable outcomes for teams.
A commitment to fostering a psychologically safe, inclusive environment that supports collaboration and innovation.

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