Principal Engineer, Data Reliability

Overview

At Xero, we’re here to help supercharge small businesses. We automate routine tasks, surface actionable insights and connect businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. This role sits within Data Reliability Engineering (DRE), which owns Xero’s scalable and reliable database platform to support software engineering teams and deliver customer value. We are migrating off our self-managed cloud database platform and will build Postgre

SQL expertise to modernise critical workloads safely and at scale.

About the role

We are looking for a talented Principal Engineer to join the Data Reliability Leadership team. You will help us achieve our goals and drive innovation through tooling and golden pathways. Principal Engineers break down silos, influence cross-functional teams, and facilitate constructive conversations to reach the best outcomes for Xero. You will work with a hypothesis-driven, experiment-first approach to test and validate ideas before implementation, collaborating with product, design, and other teams to deliver high-impact solutions that drive real business results.

• Create software - Work on initiatives spanning multiple teams to improve how Xero creates and delivers software. Guide engineering practices, help teams achieve product goals with world-class techniques, advocate for new technology and tooling, define and implement SLOs, and ensure security and data guidelines are followed.
• Deliver Golden Pathway tooling - Guide strategy and implementation of golden pathway tooling to reduce complexity and enable engineering teams to innovate on top of the database platform.
• Resolve issues - Focus on systemic and strategic prevention of issues by implementing practices and tooling that make engineering easier and reduce production risk. Participate in the team on-call roster for this role.
• Engineering standards & frameworks - Contribute to Xero-wide and portfolio standards, research industry best practices, and incorporate them as appropriate. Ensure team needs are reflected in upcoming standards and promote Dev Ops culture while addressing technical debt.
• Deliver infrastructure in production - Guide teams in delivering scalable, efficient infrastructure balancing automation, performance and customer experience. Coach engineers to ensure software runs as expected and proactively prevent customer-facing problems. Contribute to scalable system design to meet strategic objectives.

• Proven hands-on software engineering and Dev Ops expertise with a track record in leadership roles.
• Extensive experience running Postgre
  
  SQL workloads at scale and modernising database workloads to Postgre
  
  SQL, including migrations from self-hosted to cloud-managed environments.
• Technical leadership on cloud-native platforms with a focus on scalability, reliability and performance; experience leading discussions and scaling products to large user bases.
• Strong track record delivering large, complex projects with technical excellence and strategic alignment.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and influence, with the ability to present at executive level.
• Experience mentoring engineers across levels on technical challenges and career development.

$280,000 – $325,000 USD annually, plus additional benefits such as an employee share program.

We value diversity of people and thought. Our human-first culture emphasizes respect, fairness, and inclusion. Benefits include generous paid leave, wellbeing programs, medical/dental/vision insurance, fertility and family forming support, 401k match, paid parental leave, Employee Share Plan, flexible working, career development, and more to support you in doing your best work.