Responsible for incident management and reliability for Xero. Lead critical outage responses, develop scalable processes, and enhance service reliability through cross-team collaboration and ongoing training.
Our Purpose
At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small businesses, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
How You'll Make Impact
- As Xero grows there is a continued need for a keen focus on reliability to ensure customers receive service that exceeds their expectations. Xero’s Incident and Problem Management team are a part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization and are responsible for the build, delivery and ongoing maintenance of robust process and tooling around Incident management. The team is responsible for driving enduring reliability at Xero through robust, consistent and fast response to high severity incidents. They are responsible for building a world class process and ensuring that process matures as the demands of the business grows.
- This position requires an experienced SRE professional with a strong technical background, deep experience in SRE, a passion for building and delivering robust processes and extensive experience of leading technical response to high severity cloud issues. As a seasoned and relentless professional, they will drive best practice across the business and contribute to the ongoing transformation of the Xero SRE culture. As an expert communicator, they will lead technical discussions to identify and track actions associated with and identified during incident situations.
What You'll Do:
- Owns the incident management process and ensures it drives enduring reliability across all products and services within Xero.
- Provide expert leadership during critical outages, coordinating multiple teams to ensure streamlined decision-making and quick resolution.
- Lead and advocate for the transformation to a world-leading SRE organization, promoting SRE principles within the Engineering Department.
- A customer-focused approach by addressing and mitigating global customer environment issues, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence within the SRE team.
- Develop and implement scalable process frameworks and observability strategies to ensure rapid problem diagnosis, response, and service reliability.
- Collaborate with product teams to thoroughly analyze failures and integrate insights to improve service reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
- Provide ongoing training across the business to ensure the process is well understood and adhered to. This includes training appropriate engineering resources who will own Incident commander actions for lower priority issues.
- Deep dives into causes of Incidents and examines, on a proactive basis, the potential causes of future incidents and works with engineering teams to remove the risk of that failure scenarioBuild playbooks and automated response to Business continuity and DR situations to ensure response is quick and effective.
What You'll Bring With You:
- 5+ years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, with relevant experience in an Operations or Engineering environment.
- Hands-on experience troubleshooting AWS hosted servicesNetworking knowledge and able to troubleshoot TCP/IP, SSL/TLS, DNSSEC, IPsec, and BGP issues.
- Coding experience (preferably Python) building tools, scripting, or automationStrong communication (oral & written) skills including the ability to translate technical issues/concepts into agreed actions
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.
Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience. If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.
Top Skills
AWS
Bgp
Dnssec
Ipsec
Python
Ssl/Tls
Tcp/Ip
Xero San Mateo, California, USA Office
Our new Bay Area office located in San Mateo features collaborative and transformative spaces perfect for team gatherings. The office is also home to our CEO and other senior leaders!
Similar Jobs at Xero
Cloud • Fintech • Information Technology • Machine Learning • Software
As the Lead Software Engineer at Xero, you will lead frontend architecture and development, driving user experience and mentoring teams to enhance software delivery and engineering practices.
Top Skills:
ReactTypescript
Cloud • Fintech • Information Technology • Machine Learning • Software
Lead the Product Site Reliability Engineering team to enhance system reliability and performance, drive automation, and ensure observability best practices.
Top Skills:
AWSAzureGCPSre Tools
Cloud • Fintech • Information Technology • Machine Learning • Software
The Sr. Engineer for U.S. Payroll at Xero will lead software development and engineering practices while coaching teams and ensuring high standards in product delivery. Responsibilities include designing software solutions, improving development processes, managing incidents, and promoting a collaborative work environment.
Top Skills:
Agile PracticesDistributed Systems ArchitectureIncident ManagementQuality EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentSoftware Testing
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
