Lead Engineer - Inventory

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.

About the team and role

You’ll be working in the Inventory area of Xero. We are a fast paced, global team, working to uplift and re-vitialise our inventory offering at Xero.  We have engineers in both New Zealand and America, so being open to travel will be key for this role.

We are doing a large uplift in our legacy stack, coordinating with a wide range of other teams within Xero. As our technical lead, you’ll assess the feasibility of upcoming initiatives and clearly communicate your findings to varied audiences. You’ll collaborate with the team to shape or refine project plans, ensuring we are heading in the right direction. You’ll be leading some of the most complex changes to our Xero Product that Xero has seen in years.

Beyond project work, you’ll seek opportunities to enhance our processes and support the professional growth of our engineers. In this role, you won’t be on your own. You’ll have support from experienced Principal Engineers and a community of other lead engineers. You’ll also work closely with the Team Lead and Product Manager in your team, ensuring that we deliver the right solutions, in the right way, on schedule.

• Create software - Guide technical design to ensure implementation of architecture principles and good engineering practice. Identify the technical blockers and waste that slow down the team. Work with engineering leadership and delivery teams to identify technical capabilities that need to be grown. Maintain in-depth system knowledge across all system boundaries relating to the team’s components as well as hands-on development expertise.
• Test software - Guide the quality engineering practices for your team, identifying and resolving challenges to ensure processes and tools are optimised for their context and engineers have the required knowledge and skills. Contribute to and champion Xero’s quality strategy and standards.

• Resolve issues - Recognise and solve for common patterns of failure in the team’s delivery practices, preventing future issues by improving skills, processes or tooling. Measure the cost or value of issues, and often lead incident responses and post-mortems.

• Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero's engineering standards and frameworks. Work closely with engineering leadership to apply standards to software and delivery processes.

• 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 - Champion automation of delivery processes and ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.

• Modern software and delivery practices - Be a 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.

• Recruitment - Participate in interviews and recruitment processes.

• Expert knowledge in C#/.NET with some exposure to PHP is highly desirable
• Able to experiment with new languages and tooling.
• Ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.

• Experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security, testability, and ability to make changes easily.

• Expertise in distributed systems architecture.
• Ability to lead or facilitate discussions on application design.
• Experience in leading discussions and implementation for scaling products to 2-10 times the number of users.

• Able to ensure team products meet Xero's various engineering standards.
• Experience in contributing to discussions around new standards and revisions to existing ones.
• Able to act as incident coordinator in production incidents.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.

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.