Lead Site Reliability Engineer (Product SRE)

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

Xero's Product SRE teams will consist of dedicated world class SRE engineers, embedded into product teams to drive enduring reliability, world class observability, and high performing services.

The Lead Engineer will be the most senior technical resource in the team, ensuring teams are empowered to own and drive reliability across the product landscape. 

About the role

This position requires a highly technical Lead Engineer with a strong engineering background, deep experience in SRE and a passion for enabling high performing teams.

As a seasoned and relentless engineer, they will contribute to the company's Product SRE strategy and contribute to the ongoing transformation of the Xero SRE culture. As an expert communicator, they'll manage change and ensure the value of robust systems is communicated clearly across the business.

This role will become an acknowledged authority on reliability, observability, operability, and performance of the product you are assigned to through continued delivery of high quality solutions. We're looking for someone who can solve engineering problems beyond their own team and influence others to make changes. 

Any experience with reliability concepts such as: capacity management, autoscaling, safe deployment and releases, software strategies for reliability, fault tolerance, and graceful failure would be highly beneficial. Understanding of human factors, safety science, and resilience engineering are also valuable. 

What you'll do:

• Provide technical leadership to ensure completion of the day to day deliverables of a dedicated product SRE team. These will be highly experienced Site Reliability Engineers with a strong culture of ownership, automation first, and constant quality of delivery.
• Build long term relationships with product engineering teams, ensuring everyone can deliver on system reliability with a theme of continuous improvement.
• Champion observability best practice, ensuring implementation across products to ensure fast detection of impactful events. 
• Build a culture of continuous improvement to ensure product reliability is continuously improving and impact of issues are reduced; create and actively monitor quality standards for SRE teams and report regularly on its adherence.
• Build and deliver an Error Budget culture associated with consistent breaches of SLA/SLO.
• Provide ongoing training across the business to ensure reliability requirements are well understood and incorporated into product designs.

What you'll bring:

• Proven track record in technical leadership roles, with the ability to inspire and empower cross-functional teams to achieve operational excellence and drive continuous improvement.
• Extremely technical skillset, with strong engineering and hands-on SRE background. Demonstrable experience of being the technical authority in a highly technical team.
• Deep and proven experience in providing technical leadership and mentoring in world class embedded SRE teams in a fast growing company.
• Obsessed with delivering a high quality and highly stable customer experience. Passion for customer-first thinking, with a strong product mindset helping to understand and anticipate customer needs. 
• Experience of building and delivering an error budget culture associated with consistent breaches of SLA/SLO. Coupled with a 24/7 focus on incident response and remediation.
• Broad and deep technical understanding of modern cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their incident and problem management practices, particularly high-growth, high-availability SaaS-based transactional systems.
• Proficiency in one or more object-oriented programming languages (C#, JavaScript, Java, Python etc) or experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Cloudformation).
• Experience using observability tooling to monitor the health of a highly distributed system.

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, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, 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.