The Lead Engineer will enhance and maintain core engineering tools, improve developer workflows, and provide mentorship while ensuring infrastructure scalability and reliability.
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 role
We’re looking for a Lead Engineer to join our Tooling team—owning, improving, and scaling the core engineering tools used across the company. This role is ideal for someone passionate about infrastructure reliability, automation, and enhancing developer workflows. You’ll be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure behind key internal tools (e.g. SonarQube, Playwright, LaunchDarkly), building integrations that streamline engineering processes, and driving improvements that enable teams to adopt tools with ease and confidence.
As one of the most senior members of the team, you’ll play a leading role in designing scalable architectures, mentoring others, and driving technical decisions to uplift the developer experience across the organisation.
What you’ll do
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team, guiding architectural decisions and ensuring best practices are followed
- Own and maintain infrastructure for key internal tools, ensuring high availability, scalability, and reliability
- Build and evolve automation and integrations to support seamless CI/CD workflows across engineering teams
- Apply Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ideally with Terraform, to provision and manage tooling environments
- Partner with engineering teams to embed tooling into pipelines and development workflows
- Lead initiatives to uplift monitoring, observability, and operational readiness of tooling
- Write and maintain clear, useful documentation (e.g., setup guides, best practices, runbooks)
- Contribute to team’s on-call rotation and drive incident resolution and postmortems
- Champion best practices in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and internal platform reliability
- Collaborate across teams to drive adoption of tools, unblock usage issues, and enable self-service
- Stay current on tooling trends and emerging practices, helping shape long-term strategy
What you’ll bring
- Proven experience in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or internal platform tooling
- Strong background in cloud architecture and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
- Solid understanding of CI/CD pipeline concepts and distributed version control (e.g., Git)
- Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, C#, .NET)
- Experience managing or integrating engineering tools like SonarQube, LaunchDarkly, Playwright, or similar
- Excellent problem-solving skills, especially when diagnosing infrastructure or integration issues
- Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills to drive adoption and support
- Passion for improving engineering experience and building systems that scale well
- Experience writing internal documentation that supports onboarding, usage, and operations
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.
Top Skills
.Net
C#
Ci/Cd
Git
Launchdarkly
Playwright
Python
Sonarqube
Terraform
Xero Sydney, New South Wales, AUS Office
Our office is in the heart of the Sydney CBD with views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We're just over by Wynyard Park so it's easy to get to.
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