Lead Engineer - PaaS SQL - Xero - Job details

Lead Engineer - PaaS SQL at Xero

Engineering, Permanent, Melbourne, AU melbourne engineering full-time

Description

Posted a month ago

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

Who is the team?

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a cross-functional agile infrastructure development team. The PaaS team builds platform products to enable Xero development teams to build and ship software in a fast, reliable and secure manner. PaaS leverages modern cloud computing tooling and continuous integration practices. Through our customer centric approach we aim to reduce the cognitive load for Xero Product teams.

You’ll be a key part of the Platform-as-a-Service SQL team, our goal is to create a platform to provide data services to Xero product teams in a highly automated fashion. You will build on the technical capabilities of the team to own and manage the data infrastructure, troubleshoot performance issues, and resolve incidents.

We use AWS as our sole cloud provider, a combination of scripting languages like Powershell and Python for automation, along with CI/CD tools like TeamCity and Octopus Deploy to provision new infrastructure. The team is always evolving and working toward the future so any devops and automation experience can be relevant.

What’s the role?

As a Lead Engineer in PaaS you’ll work in collaboration with other Xeros to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster. You’ll model the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, supporting your team to grow their technical capability and improve development practices.

You’ll lead the software development on applications in our suite of products (including new ones), contributing to new or improved experiences for our customers, internal and external.

You’ll contribute to the technical direction of the product group, helping grow our cross functional capability by identifying technical gaps, promoting capability growth, and championing & demonstrating modern engineering principles and practices.

You'll help build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You will be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to simplify. You’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that will release value early to solve Xero customers' problems more effectively.

What you'll do:

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.

Working together - with the other Lead Engineers and the Principal Engineer across PaaS to solve problems across the whole and to work together to uplift the engineering practice.

Work closely - with the Product Owner to help build the technical roadmap for the backlog, to help prioritise technical pieces of work

Working a step ahead of the work the pod is currently doing, in order to help smooth the path, reduce risk with unknown areas

What you'll bring with you:

Expertise in your area of specialisation.

Ability to experiment with new languages and tooling.

Ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.

Experience in auditing team 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.

Ability to ensure team products meet Xero's various engineering standards.

Experience in contributing to discussions around new standards and revisions to existing ones.

Ability to act as incident coordinator in production incidents.

Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.

Why Xero?

At Xero we support many types of flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. We offer a great remuneration package including shares plus a range of leave options to suit your well-being. Our work environment encourages continuous improvement and career development and you’ll get to work with the latest technology.

Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. We are a member of Pride in Diversity, in recognition of our inclusive workplace. So, from the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.

Xero strongly encourages employees and contractors to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to work from a Xero office, or engage in any face-to-face Xero business.