Prinicipal Engineer

Xero
Auckland
Workplace: HybridFull timeFunction: Communications, PR & CommunitySkills: ["Executive communication","Strategic thinking","Problem-solving","Mentorship","Leadership"]

Lead engineering excellence across multiple teams in Xero’s product group, shaping architectural direction and evolving technical standards aligned to product strategy. Drive scalable, reliable, cloud-native systems through quality, SLOs, security and data guidelines, and proactive prevention of production issues. Establish DevOps culture and frameworks to quantify and pay down technical debt, while mentoring engineers and partnering with engineering leadership to influence group-level technical strategy.

Loading

Loading job details...

Preparing the role view and application actions.

FursaFursa
Xero
Xero
1 day ago

Prinicipal Engineer

✓ Verified Job

Canonical indexed version, validated from employer's careers page.

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 7 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead engineering excellence across multiple teams in Xero’s product group, shaping architectural direction and evolving technical standards aligned to product strategy. Drive scalable, reliable, cloud-native systems through quality, SLOs, security and data guidelines, and proactive prevention of production issues. Establish DevOps culture and frameworks to quantify and pay down technical debt, while mentoring engineers and partnering with engineering leadership to influence group-level technical strategy.
Location: Auckland
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Communications, PR & Community
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Guide engineering practices across multiple teams, advocate for new technologies and tooling, and establish portfolio-wide architectural direction.
  • •Contribute to design of highly scalable, reliable, high-performance cloud-native applications and help teams balance automation, performance, operational health, and deployment pipelines.
  • •Promote organization-wide quality standards by guiding teams on SLOs and ensuring security and data guidelines are embedded across systems.
  • •Prevent production issues through robust tooling and best practices, including participating in the team on-call rotation and refocusing projects when needed.
  • •Mentor and coach engineers across levels, foster an inclusive and high-performing environment, and participate in interviewing and community engagement as an engineering brand ambassador.

Key Requirements

  • •Extensive experience leading large, complex technical initiatives delivering cloud-native platforms with strong performance and reliability outcomes.
  • •Track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and aligning engineering delivery with broader business strategy.
  • •Proven ability to implement frameworks to quantify technical debt and prioritize remediation alongside feature delivery.
  • •Strong strategic and pragmatic problem-solving to deconstruct complex challenges into actionable outcomes and manage technical trade-offs.
  • •Outstanding ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and senior executive leaders.
Experience:Cloud-nativeEngineering leadership
Skills:Executive communicationStrategic thinkingProblem-solvingMentorshipLeadership

Company Brief

Xero
Provides cloud-based accounting, payroll, and financial management software for small and medium-sized businesses, enabling invoicing, bank reconciliation, reporting, and integrations with third-party apps globally.
Industry: Enterprise Software
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Revenue: USD 1B+
Growth: Public Company
Valuation: Public Company (Market Cap in USD)
Funding: IPO / Publicly Listed
Headquarters: Wellington, New Zealand
Founded: 2006
WebsiteLinkedIn