Senior Engineer - Apps Team

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.

How you’ll make an impact

You'll help build and manage software that solves engineering problems at scale. You’ll work in collaboration with other Xeros to help create and deliver beautiful software to our customers, faster. You’ll undertake software application development on applications in our existing suite of products (including new ones), contributing to new or improved experiences for our customers, internal and external.

You’ll help maintain the standard for engineering excellence at Xero and support your team members in building products together. You’ll demonstrate leadership on best practices, and be a role model and mentor for other team members. You’ll contribute to our cross functional environment by working towards the same objectives, using modern principles and practices.

You’ll be enabled to seek clarity with technical complexities and be able to demonstrate smart ways to automate. 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 -Care deeply about customer problems and technical excellence, develop high quality and scalable software, and coach others to do the same. Relentlessly automate any manual processes. Contribute to technical solution designs that embrace a quality-first approach. Participate in code reviews as a role model for giving and receiving feedback.

• Test software-Design and perform sophisticated testing activities that effectively and efficiently reveal product quality across a range of risk areas and quality criteria. Coach team members to enable high quality testing in line with Xero’s quality strategy and standards

• Resolve issues - Efficiently assess the causes and identify solutions for development or production issues, and effectively communicate the impact to stakeholders. Recognise common patterns of failure to mitigate issues before they reach production. Proactively participate in incident responses and contribute to post-mortems.

• Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero's engineering standards and frameworks. Work closely with the Lead and Principal Engineers 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. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected and proactively works 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.

How you’ll do it

• Live Xero’s vision and values - Keep Xero’s vision and values at the forefront of decision-making and actions. Communicate and help others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translate the vision and values into day-to-day activities and behaviours.

•  Communication skills - Proactively share information, actively solicit feedback, manage and facilitate communication if needed.

• Build relationships - Successfully build trust and credibility with stakeholders and team. Be seen as a key 'go to' person for advice.

• Growth mindset - Understand that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hard work. Coach and provide feedback to others on development plans.

• Innovation and delivery - Proactively innovate and deliver technology in a team and solve customer problems through software.

• Coaching and mentorship - Teach small groups of engineers and contribute to Xero's shared knowledge base.

•  Work collaboratively - Help individuals resolve difficult problems with empathy, exchange ideas, demonstrate conflict management skills.

• Self-learning - Maintains in-depth knowledge of advances and learnings in technologies relevant to Xero’s engineering environment.

What you’ll bring with you

• High level of experience in a range of languages and tools

• Proven ability to contribute to internal ecosystems, build SDKs and libraries to enable other teams to integrate with their products.

• Able to debug across the entire Xero technology stack to unblock the team.

• Able to make major code design decisions for individual products.

• Highly proficient in the architecture and implementation of distributed systems. Ability to refactor complex, monolithic systems into scalable, resilient components

• Proficient with CI/CD concepts and tooling.

• Strong advocate and teacher of TDD and automated tooling to safely and repeatedly release code.

• Ability to review and coordinate team processes to improve quality and strengthen feedback loops.

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.

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.  At Xero we embrace diversity and inclusion and value a #challenge mindset.

Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience . If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.

Xero is an NZ Immigration Accredited Employer and Rainbow Tick certified too.