Principal Engineer

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.

**How you’ll make an impact**

As an experienced professional engineer, you will establish a highly collaborative approach to engaging with key stakeholders with diverse technical capabilities. Given the complexities of the Data Platforms ecosystem, you will work closely with users and potential users of the platform to understand their needs and their use cases and support them to explore prototypes and interim solutions that can move them iteratively towards their long term goals, while at the same time informing the development of more permanent and scalable solutions. You will contribute and input throughout the development process of the Platform features, environments and services with a focus on implementing an engaging and low friction experience for users.

This is a critical senior role for Xero and the Data team and requires a broad set of skills, including a strong technical background, the ability to think strategically about users and platform challenges while regularly communicating confidently with diverse users, as well as high levels of EQ and empathy.

You will set technical standards, coach, mentor, and develop individuals to create an engaging Data Platforms team.

**What you'll do**:

- Analyse and prioritise requirements and priorities based on business value, technical complexity and user experience
- Working alongside other engineers and architects, you will design, prototype, and develop interim solutions to help teams understand options and determine tradeoffs.
- Establish a highly collaborative engagement approach/framework that underpins users needs and perspectives of the Data Platform while balancing operational stability, robustness and security.
- Build or integrate required Data Platform support tooling such as self-service console and monitoring for users
- Act as the pilot user and an Evangelist for Data platforms within Xero and enable onboarding of use cases to the Platform, troubleshoot issues, optimise platform components for better performance and throughput
- Lead and own iterative testing processes and generate ideas and input feedback to improve the quality of platform services, features and environments for better
- Generate ideas and input into framing the future landscape of the Data Platform(s) ecosystem.
- Be the owner of the Data Platform(s) documentation and establish a knowledge management framework that is maintained regularly.
- Develop a strong understanding of Xero’s architecture and data
- Provide leadership, guidance and technical mentoring to engineering teams, including code reviews to uplift capability and skills
- Cultivate a fun, rewarding, innovative and results-driven culture that lives and breathes our Xero values

**What you'll bring with you**:

- Proven experience developing and maintaining Data Platform Services on Cloud Infrastructure
- Experience in defining, designing and maintaining large-scale Enterprise Data Platforms and solutions
- Demonstrable experience in operating at a senior technical level
- Extensive experience in one or more programming languages
- An understanding of, and experience in measuring non-functionals, like reliability, availability, security, usability and performance
- Proven experience facilitating discussions with technical and non-technical audiences
- Effective business and tech analyst, agile problem-solver
- Takes #ownership of problems and executes a pragmatic and collaborative approach to their resolve
- Excellent communication and technical writing skills
- Organised, result-oriented, self-motivated and has a resilient attitude.
- An empathetic approach to stakeholder management and user engagement, demonstrating high levels of EQ and collaboration

**What success looks like**

As a successful Principal Engineer - Data Platforms Experience, you'll push the Data Platform(s) to its limit by creating a highly engaged community of users who are actively suggesting new features and consistently engaging with the platform(s). You'll have built a strong community by establishing relationships with the users, providing technical support, developing tools for ease of use and producing relevant, compelling content to help awareness and adoption.

Your approach to designing, prototyping, and developing interim solutions will help reduce the cycle time of Data Platform features, and the teams impacted by