Senior Engineer - Engineering Experience (Release Controls)
Wellington, NZ / Auckland, NZ / Remote, NZ
Technology – Engineering /
Hybrid
Our Purpose
At Xero, we’re here to help supercharge small businesses. 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.
About the Team
At the core of Xero's product innovation is the Catalyst Engineering Division, our dedicated platform engineering and developer enablement function. We are the engine that powers Xero's global engineering teams. Our mission is to provide the platform and tools that enable the rapid, secure, and robust development of products that delight Xero’s customers. The Catalyst Engineering Division is at the forefront of technology strategy and adoption at Xero, comprising some of the brightest technology leaders in the industry.
This Senior Engineer role sits within the Release Controls Team, which looks after the internal developer portal, change management, and standards compliance automation. As a Senior Engineer, you will be building and maintaining internal tools and capabilities that help teams track their compliance with engineering and reliability standards and enable them to ship changes to production with confidence. You will also be responsible for maintaining the internal developer portal which involves building improvements in our engineer workflows.
About the Role
As a Senior Engineer on the Release Controls pod, you'll be a strong technical voice and a hands-on engineer. You'll leverage your expertise to architect, build, and maintain essential internal tooling. This isn't just a hands-on role - it's an opportunity to drive technical decisions, champion engineering excellence, and directly influence the engineering experience in Xero. You'll also play a key role in mentoring junior team members and shaping the technical direction of internal product offerings.
What you'll do:
- Provide technical support and contribute toward strategic direction for the design, development, and operation of Xero's internal developer portal and systems that track deployments and compliance with engineering standards.
- Mentor junior engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and engineering excellence.
- Contribute to the architectural vision and technical roadmap for your pod's domain, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and align with Xero's broader technical strategy.
- Champion and implement modern engineering principles, including infrastructure as code, comprehensive automation, and data-driven decision-making to enhance the effectiveness of Xero's platform.
- Lead complex engineering projects, from initial concept through to delivery and ongoing operational support, solving challenging problems at scale.
What you'll bring:
- Proven experience in a senior technical role, with a track record of mentoring engineers and delivering complex, distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in cloud networking and infrastructure, particularly with AWS, and a strong command of container orchestration using Kubernetes.
- Extensive hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, using tools like Terraform to build and manage production environments.
- Strong software development fundamentals, with proficiency in C# or similar transferable skillset.
- A strategic mindset with the ability to solve complex problems, assess technical trade-offs, and make data-informed decisions.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
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, free medical insurance, 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.
