Senior Software Engineer
Remote, UK
Technology – Engineering /
Permanent /
Remote
Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.
At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.
You'll help build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You'll work in our UK Payroll team whose purpose it is to make life better for small business owners to pay and manage their people. In
collaboration with other Xeros you'll help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster.
You’ll undertake software application development on applications in our existing suite of products
(including new ones), contributing to new or improved experiences for our customers, internal and
external.
You’ll help maintain the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and support your team members
in building products together. You’ll demonstrate leadership on best practices, and be a role model
and mentor for other team members. You’ll contribute to our cross functional environment by
working towards the same objectives, using modern principles and practices.
You’ll be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to
automate. 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 - Guide technical design to ensure implementation of architecture principles and good engineering practice. Identify the technical blockers and waste that slow down the team. Work with engineering leadership and delivery teams to identify technical capabilities that need to be grown. Maintain in-depth system knowledge across all system boundaries relating to the team’s components as well as hands-on development expertise.
- Test software - Guide the quality engineering practices for your team, identifying and resolving challenges to ensure processes and tools are optimized for their context and engineers have the required knowledge and skills. Contribute to and champion Xero’s quality strategy and standards.
- Resolve issues - Recognise and solve for common patterns of failure in the team’s delivery practices, preventing future issues by improving skills, processes or tooling. Measure the cost or value of issues, and often lead incident responses and post-mortems.
- Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero's engineering standards and frameworks. Work closely with engineering leadership to apply standards to software and delivery processes.
- 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 - Champion automation of delivery processes and ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.
- Modern software and delivery practices - Be a 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.
- Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment processes.
How you'll do it
- Live Xero’s vision and values - Keeps Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of 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 behaviours.
- Communication skills - Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization. Maintains awareness and understanding of the team's vision and strategy to help make better technical decisions.
- Build relationships - Builds and maintains trust and credibility with a wide range of internal stakeholders, and supporting teams from across Xero.
- 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.
- Innovation and delivery - Leads teams to innovate and deliver technology and solve customer problems through software.
- Coaching and mentorship - Role models best practice mentoring and coaching, encourages
- others to mentor each other and creates ways for them to do so.
- Evangelism - Promotes Xero as a great, innovative company and workplace to the wider
- industry.
- Work collaboratively - Empowers and promotes high performing teams.
- Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies
- relevant to Xero’s engineering environment.
What you'll bring with you
- Experience in the tech we use C#/.Net, React, SQL Server, and AWS.
- Expert in your area of specialisation.
- Able to experiment with new languages and tooling.
- Ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.
- Experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security, testability, and ability to make changes easily.
- Expertise in distributed systems architecture.
- Ability to lead or facilitate discussions on application design.
- Experience in leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 2-10 times the number of users.
- Able to ensure team products meet Xero's various engineering standards.
- Experience in contributing to discussions around new standards and revisions to existing ones.
- Able to act as incident coordinator in production incidents.
- Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.
Why Xero?
Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, private medical insurance, gym passes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience . If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.
