Role Impact
As a Principal Engineer for Site Reliability, you will be a thought leader driving strategic technical direction across the organisation, focusing on systemic reliability improvements. You will help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, lead initiatives to grow technical capabilities, and evolve the technical architecture of our software.
You will have a huge impact on the business, tasked with implementing strategic capacity forecasting and performance optimisation to ensure critical systems accommodate growth without service degradation.
Your influence will span technical strategy, simplifying complex challenges, and championing innovation and automation by designing expert-level tools and frameworks that significantly reduce manual toil.
The Team
The Product Site Reliability Engineering team comprises 22 members spread across the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Their core mission is to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of products through proactive engineering and deep partnership. Together, the team drives systemic problem‐solving, leads critical incident response, and translates ambiguous problems into actionable work.
Current Focus Areas
* Driving strategic technical direction and shaping system architecture for multiple complex, distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices.
* Designing and implementing comprehensive monitoring and observability solutions to gain deep, actionable, data‐driven insights.
* Championing automation and delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience.
* Actively mentoring and elevating the SRE capabilities of the wider organisation, setting code quality and best practices.
Location and Working Arrangements
This role can be based anywhere on the East Coast of Australia, with the expectation of partnership with teams in New Zealand and the US. We support flexible working arrangements, including hybrid and fully remote options.
Qualifications
* Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices architecture.
* Skilled in designing and implementing expert-level automation frameworks and tools (not just one‐off scripts).
* Exceptional ability to mentor and guide others, fostering a culture of SRE excellence across the organisation.
* Excellent communication and presentation skills, capable of influencing technical strategy across the organisation.
* Proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.
* Proven ability to translate ambiguous problems into actionable work and exercise strategic decision‐making under pressure during critical incidents.
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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