Engineering Manager - Platform Elements
Melbourne, AU
Technology – Platform /
Permanent /
Hybrid
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.
About the team:
Platform Elements is a cross-functional agile infrastructure development team. The Platform team builds platform products to enable Xero development teams to build and ship software in a fast, reliable and secure manner. Platform leverages modern cloud computing tooling and continuous integration practices. Through our customer centric approach we aim to reduce the cognitive load for Xero Product teams.
They embed with teams or engage through targeted projects to tackle complex, high-priority work which fast-tracks uplifting systems to follow best practices. For example, migrating systems from manually-created EC2 instances to immutable containers running on Kubernetes, or implementing automated build/deploy pipelines in CI configured via code.
Our product engineering teams are their “internal customer” - so working effectively across a large group of people as a team is a key to success. They operate Delivery & Support services centered on uplifting non-functional aspects of software, through enabling and helping engineers to continuously improve their systems. They take pride in measurement, and extend this to capturing feedback from our customers to learn and improve on the services we deliver to them.
What you'll do:
- You’ll engage, understand, collaborate, and communicate effectively with peers and teams across Xero to drive continuous improvement towards Xero’s sustainably excellent engineering vision.
- You’ll help lead your team to successfully identify, scope, manage, and complete work which delivers measurable improvements to production systems in a timely manner.
- Be a key member of the engineering leadership team where you will drive performance, culture, an inspiring environment an continuous improvement of team rituals and processes
- Maintain current knowledge of technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications.
- Manage stakeholder expectations and build relationships
- Promote a culture of measurement, data-driven decisions, hypothesis-driven development, and continuous improvement.
- People Management across different geo-locations
- Attract, recruit, and retain capable people, building on and complementing the diversity of our teams.
- Provide technical coaching, mentoring, and training to people and teams with the tools and practices we use, to empower them to execute successfully and with autonomy
- Create a culture for your teams that is fun, rewarding, innovative, and results-driven. Manage and provide feedback to your team, to support high performance and personal and professional development.
What you bring:
- Extensive people management experience.
- Experience leading lean software engineering teams which own their software in production, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure, SLOs, and on-call/incident management.
- Proven experience building and running secure, highly-available production software and infrastructure in AWS (or comparable cloud platform).
- Strong working knowledge of multiple programming languages, operating systems, and networking protocols.
- Ability to build, lead, mentor, and develop an engineering team.
- A passion for measurement, data-driven decision making, hypothesis-driven development, and developer experience.
- Excellent communication and networking skills - ability to work with a wide variety of people.
- Ability to take initiative combined with commitment to continuous improvement and quality.
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, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. We are a member of Pride in Diversity, in recognition of our inclusive workplace. Our goal is to make sure you feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.
At Xero we embrace diversity and inclusion and value a #challenge mindset. 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.
