Principal Engineer (Site Reliability/SRE)

This role will be a thought leader, driving strategic technical direction across the organisation, with a focus on systemic reliability improvements.

As a Principal Engineer for Site Reliability; you'll help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, lead initiatives to grow technical capabilities, and evolve the technical architecture of our software.

This role will have huge impact on the business! You'll be tasked with implementing strategic capacity forecasting and performance optimisation, to ensure critical systems accommodate growth without service degradation.

Your influence will span technical strategy, simplifying complex challenges, and championing innovation and automation by designing expert-level tools and frameworks that significantly reduce manual toil.

The Product Site Reliability Engineering team comprises 22 members spread across the US, Australia, and New Zealand.

Their core mission is to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of products through proactive engineering and deep partnership. Together, the team drives systemic problem-solving, leading critical incident response and translating ambiguous problems into actionable work.

• Driving strategic technical direction and shaping system architecture for multiple complex, distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices.

• Designing and implementing comprehensive monitoring and observability solutions to gain deep, actionable, data-driven insights.

• Championing automation and delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure, balancing automation, performance, and customer experience.

• Actively mentoring and elevating the SRE capabilities of the wider organisation, setting code quality and best practices.

This role can be based in the anywhere on the East Coast of Australia, with the expectation of partnership with teams in New Zealand and the US.

We support flexible working arrangements, including hybrid and fully remote options.

• Extensive career background in site reliability engineering, combined with advanced software engineering skills.

• You possess expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, and microservices architecture.

• You are skilled in designing and implementing expert-level automation frameworks and tools (not just one-off scripts).

• You will bring exceptional ability to mentor and guide others, fostering a culture of SRE excellence across the organisation.

• You demonstrate excellent communication and presentation skills, capable of influencing technical strategy across the organisation.

• You are proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.

• You will have proven ability to translate ambiguous problems into actionable work and exercise strategic decision-making under pressure during critical incidents.

Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.