Principal Software Engineer Part Time

Xero

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 the first engineering hire in a brand new team, you’re going to be working with a product manager and a business analyst in a large discovery project. Your challenge will be to understand a complex business problem and define a proof of concept, a release plan, and work with new teams to achieve the desired solution in 18 months.

As a Principal Engineer you won’t be limited to work on development only, but rather the entire development lifecycle. You will be doing a lot of discovery, gathering requirements, architecture, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps.

Our team culture

We work in small cross-functional teams. Each team has the autonomy and flexibility to choose their methodology and process to work.

Collaboration is key and you will spend many hours a day/week working with a product manager, business analyst, architect and many other stakeholders.

How your first 3 months will look like:

Understand the business domain and discovery

Identify key components

Work with PM/BA to prioritise what problems to solve first

Help on new hires for the team that will be working with you

Build an early prototype

How your first 9 months will look like:

Have a proof of concept ready

Interviews for new hires

Mentor new engineers

How your first 15 months will look like:

Have a product in market

What you’ll do

• Create software – Work on initiatives that span multiple teams to improve how Xero creates and delivers software. You’ll guide engineering practices of teams, helping them achieve product goals via world-class engineering techniques. Advocate for the adoption of new technology and tooling to support product requirements. Guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs. Ensure security and data guidelines are implemented.
• Test software – Promote the quality engineering strategy and standards for Xero, and support teams in evolving their practices and skills to be effective and compliant. Identify and implement initiatives that lift the quality capabilities of Xero’s engineering teams. Energise the community of practice for quality.
• Resolve issues – Focus on systemic and strategic prevention of issues by implementing practices and tooling that make world class engineering easy, and limit the scope for failure either during the development lifecycle or in production.
• Engineering standards & frameworks – Be involved with the creation and promotion of Xero wide as well as portfolio level standards and frameworks. Research industry best practice and implement as appropriate in the context of Xero. Ensure team’s needs and feedback is represented in upcoming standards.
• Continuous improvement – Proactively maintain, grow and share knowledge of development technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications.
• Deliver infrastructure in a production environment – Collect data and quantify the effect of automation at a product group level or wider. Ensure deployment pipelines are fit for purpose. Coach and support engineers to ensure all software is running as expected. Proactively work to prevent customer facing problems.
• Modern software and delivery practices – Proactive champion of agile and delivery practices who coaches and develops others in this space in order to ensure a consistent approach to ways of working. Working with the engineering leaders and agile practitioners to identify technical solutions that can help improve the product group processes.
• Recruitment – Participate in interviews and recruitment programmes, actively engage with the external tech community, take part in external speaking engagements, and promote Xero brand.

What you’ll bring with you

• Able to regularly review delivery and production metrics to identify areas of improvement for product groups.
• Experience in developing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and when to pay it down.
• Significant experience in the discovery, requirements gathering and architecture stage of software development.
• Ability to advocate for and help design automated processes and tooling that ensures products teams deliver are correct, secure, and safe to deploy.
• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines.
• Development experience in .Net, C# and JavaScript

Why Xero?

At Xero we support many types of flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. We offer a great remuneration package with benefits that support a range of lifestyle choices and requirements and the opportunity to participate in Xero’s success through our Long Term Incentive scheme. Xero has rapidly expanding offices in London, Milton Keynes and Manchester and our work environment encourages continuous improvement and career development.

Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. We are a Stonewall Diversity Champion, and Disability Confident committed. So, from the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.