Sr. Principal Engineer
Xero
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Tuesday, June 11, 2024
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.
Xero is looking for a talented Sr. Principal Engineer to bootstrap and oversee our new Syndication team.
As a Sr. Principal Engineer in this space you'll drive the strategy, and execution for a key strategic initiative at Xero. You will develop a deep understanding of Xero's end-to-end product experiences, operations and develop overarching strategy for how we scope, and build out future product partnerships. This role will need to understand not only how a large set of technical services within Xero work together, but also how they interface and enable adjacent functions, capabilities and programs across our business. This Sr. Principal Engineer will drive the strategy and execution for Syndication across core engineering systems in Xero, and strike the right balance between feature velocity and building the right longer term platform for Xero.
To do this effectively requires collaborating and aligning across 5 to 6 VP cross functional stakeholders on the vision and plan. The Sr. Principal Engineer must possess a broad and deep understanding of the architecture and operations of Xero's Engineering team, and create scalable solutions to support heterogeneous functions at scale.
The Sr. Principal Engineer will need to understand not just the technical and product capabilities but the nuances of the businesses they are supporting, and help to drive balance between stakeholder objectives, while simultaneously building trust and demonstrating empathy with their customers’ needs.
What You'll Do:
- Lead the definition, design, architecture, development, and delivery of the most advanced, most difficult, most cross-cutting, and/or most ambiguous challenges spanning across our engineering systems. You may own one or more critical product areas.
- Ensure that the teams within teams in related organizations are aligned to a coherent technical vision and deliver systems that fit well together.
- Influence multiple teams across multiple orgs, increasing their productivity and effectiveness. You hold peers and teams to a high bar.
- Considered to be an authority on technical issues by both the technical and business community and are frequently consulted for making difficult trade-off decisions. You are respected for your technical expertise and have credibility with others based on your accomplishments. You drive awareness about the impact and consequences of technical decisions on the business.
- You relentlessly simplify.
- You demonstrate significant innovation, creativity, and judgement when solving challenging problems.
- You identify future skills needed across your organization and advocate for the development and/or acquisition of those skills to senior leaders. You scout top talent and recruit them to Xero.
- You actively mentor Senior and Principal engineers. You develop and institutionalize best practices.
Basic Qualifications:
- 10+ years of professional software development experience.
- 8+ years of programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++.
- 8+ years of experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- 2+ years hands-on experience as a Technical Lead Manager leading multiple software engineering functions/projects.
- Experience shipping successful large-scale consumer products.
- Experience partnering with Research Science or Machine Learning experts to drive optimizations using the latest techniques.
- Past management/Senior management experience is a plus.
Why Xero?
Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. 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, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.