Senior Engineer - Data Reliability

The role / impact

This is a Senior Engineer role blending responsive technical support with forward-looking strategic database consulting and design. Your core responsibility will be to ensure the stability and high quality of Xero's databases by providing expertise on maintenance, optimisations and incident support. You will act as a quality champion, performing due diligence on database changes before products ship to customers and playing a hands-on role in supporting and releasing database changes to multiple environments including production.

A key impact of your work will be to influence the modernisation of Xero's data infrastructure. You will be instrumental in advising product teams on database design and architecture for new initiatives, specifically championing the adoption of cloud-native technologies. This involves interpreting code behavior to understand the impact on database performance and coaching other engineers, solidifying your role as a technical leader and problem solver.

The team / how they connect

The Consulting Across the Southern Hemisphere (CASH) team provides critical support to Xero's product engineering teams, with a deep focus on the database domain. This small, remote-first team supports multiple product areas concurrently, offering expertise in database operations, quality deployment support for changes, and strategic architectural design. As a Senior Engineer, you will join a global on-call roster and work closely with product teams to build capability and reduce the need for ad-hoc support.

The team is currently working on

• Actively supporting the migration of the SQL Server fleet from self-hosted EC2s to Amazon RDS SQL postgres.

• Providing consulting expertise to product teams moving their services to postgres Aurora and DynamoDB.

• Developing proof-of-concepts, automation, and validation using PowerShell

• Leveraging your deep understanding of database observability tooling, particularly AWS tooling, to improve monitoring and performance.
  

Here are some of the things we're looking for, for this role

• You will demonstrate strategic ability to advise product teams on database design, architecture, and technology choices for new initiatives.

• You will bring experience with postgres Aurora and/or DynamoDB to complement the team's existing SQL Server expertise.

• You will be comfortable interpreting application code (e.g., C#) and asking technical questions to understand intent and impact on the database layer.

• Experience with migration work, moving services from one platform or technology to a modern, managed cloud solution.

• You will possess excellent technical hygiene, including familiarity with source code interrogation tools like Git and ticket handling in Jira