Principal Engineer

This Principal Engineer role in Product Site Reliability Engineering is a chance to be a thought leader and drive strategic technical direction across the organisation, focusing on systemic reliability improvements. You'll help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and lead initiatives to grow technical capabilities and evolve the technical architecture of our software. This role will have a large-scale impact on the business by implementing strategic capacity forecasting and performance optimisation to ensure critical systems accommodate growth without service degradation. Your influence will span technical strategy, simplifying complex challenges, and championing innovation and automation by designing expert-level tools and frameworks that significantly reduce manual toil.

The Product Site Reliability Engineering team comprises 22 members spread across the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Their core mission is to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of products through proactive engineering and deep partnership. Together, the team drives systemic problem-solving, leading critical incident response and translating ambiguous problems into actionable work.

• Driving strategic technical direction and shaping system architecture for multiple complex, distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices.

• Designing and implementing comprehensive monitoring and observability solutions to gain deep, actionable, data-driven insights.

• Championing automation and delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience.

• Actively mentoring and elevating the SRE capabilities of the wider organisation, setting code quality and best practices.

This role can be based in the West Coast in the US , with the expectation of partnership with teams in Australia and New Zealand. We support flexible working and have flexibility in hybrid way of working.

• You possess expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices architecture.

• You are skilled in designing and implementing expert-level automation frameworks and tools (not just one-off scripts).

• You will bring exceptional ability to mentor and guide others, fostering a culture of SRE excellence across the organisation.

• You demonstrate excellent communication and presentation skills, capable of influencing technical strategy across the organisation.

• You are proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.

• You will have proven ability to translate ambiguous problems into actionable work and exercise strategic decision-making under pressure during critical incidents.

Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.