Scale Engineer

Prinicipal Engineer

Principal Engineer · Principal · Full Time

NZ: Auckland: Xero 4 (96 St Georges Bay Rd, Level 2 & 3)USD 180k – 250k1w ago
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Role

What you'll do.

As a Principal Engineer at Xero, you will drive technical strategy and engineering excellence across multiple product teams, shaping cloud-native architecture and DevOps culture while mentoring engineers and influencing executive-level technical decisions. This leadership role combines hands-on technical contribution with strategic architectural vision, requiring extensive experience leading large-scale technical initiatives on cloud platforms and demonstrating exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both engineering teams and senior executives.

Responsibilities

  • Technical Architecture & Engineering Excellence: Guide engineering practices across multiple product teams, establish portfolio-wide architectural direction, and advocate for new technologies and tooling. Evolve technical architecture in alignment with product strategy while ensuring alignment with cloud-native best practices and scalability requirements.
  • Cloud-Native Systems Design: Contribute to the design and implementation of highly scalable, reliable, and performant cloud-native applications. Lead teams in balancing automation, performance optimization, operational health, and continuous deployment pipelines to support rapid delivery of features at scale.
  • Quality Standards & Reliability: Promote and establish Xero-wide quality standards and service level objectives (SLOs). Guide teams in implementing robust quality frameworks, embedding security and data governance guidelines across systems, and establishing reliability practices that meet customer expectations.
  • Production Reliability & DevOps Culture: Focus on proactive prevention of production issues through robust tooling, monitoring, and engineering best practices. Shape DevOps culture across the organization, participate in on-call rotation, and establish frameworks to measure and minimize downtime and system failures.
  • Technical Debt Strategy: Establish frameworks to quantify the cost of technical debt, create prioritization models for strategic debt reduction, and drive cultural change around technical debt management. Balance ongoing feature delivery with necessary technical debt paydown to maintain system health and developer velocity.
  • Engineering Leadership & Mentorship: Mentor and coach engineers across all levels, including Lead Engineers, creating a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing engineering culture. Provide strategic guidance on career development and establish engineering best practices that elevate team capabilities across the product group.
  • Strategic Collaboration & Communication: Partner closely with engineering leadership to influence group-level technical strategy, break down organizational silos, and drive data-driven architectural decisions. Communicate complex technical concepts with clarity and nuance to both technical teams and senior executive stakeholders.
  • Talent Acquisition & Community Engagement: Participate actively in engineering interviews and hiring processes to identify and recruit top technical talent. Engage with the external tech community through speaking, open-source contributions, and technical thought leadership to enhance Xero's engineering brand and reputation.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Large-Scale System Architecture

    Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and scaling complex distributed systems on cloud platforms. Demonstrated expertise in architectural patterns, system design trade-offs, and performance optimization for high-throughput, low-latency systems.

  • Cloud-Native Platform Expertise

    Deep experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Proficiency in containerization technologies, microservices architecture, infrastructure-as-code, and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. Strong understanding of managed services and serverless architectures.

  • DevOps & Infrastructure Excellence

    Advanced knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, monitoring, logging, and observability practices. Experience establishing DevOps culture, implementing SLO/SLA frameworks, and building reliability engineering practices. Proficiency with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools.

  • Technical Leadership & Architecture Influence

    Proven ability to lead and influence large-scale technical initiatives across multiple teams. Experience defining architectural direction, establishing technical standards, and making complex engineering trade-off decisions. Track record of successful technology migrations or major platform upgrades.

  • Software Engineering Best Practices

    Mastery of modern software development practices including code quality frameworks, testing strategies, design patterns, and security-by-design principles. Experience implementing technical standards, code review practices, and quality assurance processes across engineering organizations.

  • Data-Driven Decision Making

    Ability to analyze complex technical and business data to inform architectural decisions. Experience using metrics, observability data, and analytics to drive technical strategy, prioritize initiatives, and measure engineering effectiveness.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent discipline. This provides foundational knowledge in algorithms, systems design, and computer architecture essential for principal-level engineering work.

  • Advanced Technical Certifications (Optional)

    Cloud platform certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Expert, GCP Professional Cloud Architect) or relevant advanced technical certifications can demonstrate specialized expertise, though hands-on experience is prioritized.

Experience

  • Principal/Staff Engineer or Technical Leadership Role

    Minimum 10-15 years of software engineering experience with at least 4-6 years in senior technical leadership roles (Principal, Staff, or equivalent). Demonstrated success in driving technical strategy at the organizational or team level.

  • Leading Cross-Functional Technical Initiatives

    Proven track record leading multiple complex technical initiatives to successful delivery. Experience coordinating across engineering teams, product, and business stakeholders to align technical solutions with business objectives.

  • Scaling Systems & Teams

    Experience scaling systems from small initial deployments to high-volume production environments handling millions of transactions or concurrent users. Demonstrated success growing engineering teams and establishing engineering cultures at scale.

  • Executive & Stakeholder Communication

    Strong track record communicating technical strategy, architectural decisions, and engineering recommendations to C-level executives, product leaders, and other senior stakeholders. Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences.

  • Technical Debt Management

    Proven experience quantifying technical debt, establishing prioritization frameworks, and successfully executing technical debt reduction initiatives. Demonstrated ability to balance innovation with maintenance work and explain technical debt impact to business stakeholders.

  • Mentorship & Culture Building

    Demonstrated commitment to mentoring engineers at various career levels and establishing inclusive, high-performing engineering cultures. Experience fostering psychological safety, enabling career growth, and creating environments where engineering excellence thrives.

Skills

Required

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Expert-level understanding of distributed systems principles, consistency models, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns. Ability to architect solutions for high-availability, resilience, and performance at scale.

  • Cloud Platform Architecture

    Deep expertise with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). Proficiency in cloud-native design patterns, managed services, serverless computing, and optimizing for cloud economics and operational efficiency.

  • Microservices & API Design

    Advanced knowledge of microservices architecture patterns, API design principles, inter-service communication, and data consistency challenges. Experience implementing service-oriented systems with proper governance and standards.

  • DevOps & Continuous Delivery

    Mastery of CI/CD implementation, infrastructure-as-code, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and deployment automation. Expertise in establishing deployment frequency, lead time, and mean time to recovery metrics.

  • Observability & Monitoring

    Expert knowledge of monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, and metrics collection. Ability to establish comprehensive observability practices, implement alert strategies, and create dashboards that drive operational insights.

  • Technical Strategy & Roadmapping

    Ability to develop long-term technical vision, create multi-year roadmaps aligned with business strategy, and articulate technology direction to stakeholders. Experience making trade-off decisions between technical depth, team capacity, and business needs.

  • Executive Communication & Influence

    Outstanding verbal and written communication skills with ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Demonstrated ability to influence key decisions through persuasive, data-driven communication.

  • Mentorship & Technical Coaching

    Proven ability to identify engineering talent, provide constructive feedback, and mentor engineers through career transitions. Expertise in establishing technical standards, conducting effective code reviews, and fostering continuous learning.

  • Problem Decomposition & Trade-off Analysis

    Expert-level ability to break down complex, ambiguous challenges into clear, actionable engineering tasks. Skilled at navigating technical trade-offs between performance, reliability, maintainability, cost, and time-to-market.

  • Security & Compliance

    Deep understanding of security principles, data governance, regulatory compliance requirements, and privacy considerations. Ability to embed security thinking throughout system architecture and establish company-wide security standards.

Preferred

  • Open Source Contributions

    Nice to have

    Active involvement in open-source projects, including contributions to widely-used libraries or tools. Demonstrates thought leadership and commitment to the engineering community.

  • Public Speaking & Technical Thought Leadership

    Nice to have

    Experience presenting at conferences, writing technical blog posts, or producing educational content. Shows ability to communicate ideas effectively and contribute to the industry conversation.

  • SaaS Platform Experience

    Nice to have

    Prior experience building or scaling SaaS products, particularly in the fintech, accounting, or business software space. Understanding of SaaS-specific challenges around multi-tenancy, data isolation, and scalability.

  • Accounting or Financial Software Domain Knowledge

    Nice to have

    Background in accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll systems, or financial software. Domain expertise accelerates impact when working on Xero's product portfolio.

  • Startup & Scale-up Experience

    Nice to have

    Background scaling engineering organizations from early stage to mature organization. Understanding of how technical decisions evolve as organizations grow and how to maintain quality while scaling velocity.

  • Cross-Functional Product Development

    Nice to have

    Experience partnering closely with product management, design, and business teams to deliver customer-focused solutions. Demonstrates ability to balance technical purity with pragmatic business requirements.

  • Data-Driven Engineering Culture

    Nice to have

    Experience establishing metrics-driven engineering practices, including measuring developer productivity, system reliability, and deployment frequency. Comfortable working in environments where decisions are backed by data.

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 180,000 – 250,000

Full posting

Original listing.

About Xero

At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology, and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small businesses we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

How You’ll Make an Impact

As a Principal Engineer, you will work in collaboration across multiple teams within our product group to help create and deliver world-class software to our customers, faster.

You will help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, evolving our technical architecture in alignment with product strategy, and leading initiatives that grow the technical capabilities of our engineers. Partnering closely with engineering leadership (including Stephen Dewar), you will influence group-level technical strategy, break down organizational silos, and drive data-driven architectural decisions that release value early to solve complex customer problems at scale.

What You’ll Do

  • Engineering Excellence & Architecture: Guide engineering practices across multiple teams, advocate for new technologies and tooling, and establish portfolio-wide architectural direction.

  • Scalable Systems & Infrastructure: Contribute to the design of highly scalable, reliable, and performant cloud-native applications. Guide teams in balancing automation, performance, operational health, and deployment pipelines.

  • Quality & Reliability: Promote Xero-wide quality standards, guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs, and ensure security and data guidelines are embedded across systems.

  • Systemic Issue Prevention: Focus on proactive prevention of production issues through robust tooling and engineering best practices. Participate in the team on-call rotation and help refocus projects when needed.

  • Technical Debt & DevOps Culture: Shape thinking around DevOps culture, establish frameworks to quantify the cost of technical debt, and drive strategic pay-down of tech debt.

  • Coaching & Talent Growth: Mentor and coach engineers across all levels (including Lead Engineers), creating a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing environment.

  • Recruitment & Community: Participate in interviewing, actively engage with the external tech community, and act as an ambassador for Xero’s engineering brand.

What You’ll Bring With You

  • Proven Technical Leadership: Extensive experience leading large, complex technical initiatives to delivery on cloud-native platforms, with a track record of scaling for performance and reliability.

  • Executive Communication: Outstanding ability to communicate complex technical concepts with nuance and clarity to technical teams and senior executive leaders alike.

  • Strategic Architectural Vision: Demonstrated capability in contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and aligning engineering delivery with broader business strategy.

  • Pragmatic Problem Solving: Skilled in deconstructing complex challenges into clear, actionable outcomes and navigating technical trade-offs.

  • Technical Debt Management: Proven ability to implement frameworks to quantify technical debt and prioritize remediation alongside feature delivery.

  • Mentorship & Culture: A strong commitment to coaching engineers, driving delivery practices, and fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe, and collaborative engineering culture.

Why Xero?

At Xero, we value our culture and live our values every day:

  • We Make it Beautiful: We challenge ourselves to dream big, innovate, and inspire.

  • We Make it Happen: We value progress over perfection, driving clarity, decisiveness, and accountability.

  • We Make it Human: We care personally and challenge respectfully in an empathetic and inclusive environment.

  • We Make it Together: We build trust through transparency, diverse perspectives, and strong relationships.

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.

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