Principal Software Engineer
San Mateo, US / Seattle, US
Technology – Engineering /
Permanent /
Hybrid
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
$266,000 - $315,000 a year
Why Xero?
Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. 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, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development 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.
