VP Engineering

VP Engineering

Our Purpose

At Xero, we’re here to supercharge small businesses. By making small business 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 business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

How you’ll make an impact

The VP Engineering will lead, grow, and manage a leadership team and their engineering teams that are accountable for engineering, operational and people excellence resulting in high-quality software and stable applications which improves the quality of life for small businesses and their advisors.

Working closely with Product Management, Architecture and Engineering teams, the GM Engineering provides technical oversight across their portfolio, ensuring the right things are built at the right time and through doing so will contribute to Xero achieving its goals.

As the VP Engineering, you will be responsible for teams of Xeros that create value for our small businesses and our partners by building and informing the centralized Platform and Enablement strategies.

What you’ll do

• Be accountable for driving the Quarterly Planning process within your remit and the delivery of the quarterly activities, within the agreed timeframes.

• Be accountable for engineering teams actively measuring, monitoring, and continuously improving the performance and reliability of the applications they are responsible for by creating an environment where risks are identified and recorded early and become part of the roadmaps.

• Be accountable for ensuring the teams clearly understand and adhere to the Engineering Standards and the team take ownership for their responsibility to align their delivery practices to these standards.

• Work with key stakeholders to align strategies of building and testing software that complements Xero’s engineering teams’ efforts to improve the throughput and stability of our delivery systems.

• Build and lead an effective team of engineering leaders and practitioners who continually improve and deliver value to our customers.

• Effectively manage your engineering team's budget with a focus on implementing controls to drive cost efficiencies and improvement, with a strategic focus on making commercially sound decisions.

• Ensure there is adequate support is in place as required to meet product SLOs (e.g on call support rosters, run book documentation, alerting).

• Ensure your team understands how the Product group’s strategy, within your area, aligns with the Xero strategy.

• Support teams to prioritize, participate, and report progress on Xero-wide engineering initiatives and standards adoption.

• Work with your teams to provision regular, relevant and understandable reporting on technical initiatives for stakeholders.

• Be an advocate for Xero’s ongoing commitment to Xero’s enablement strategy for our software, and the continued decomposition of monolithic applications.

• Work with the delivery centers of excellence to ensure all teams understand what it means to be agile and are able to implement modern agile software development practices.

• Participate in procurement activities and be accountable for software procurement decisions and actions where appropriate.

• Encourage teams to experiment with new product ideas, technologies, tools and ways of working while remaining accountable for commitments to customers and other stakeholders.

• Cultivate a fun, rewarding, innovative and results-oriented culture that lives and breathes our Xero values

• Remain up to date with software engineering and technology changes and trends and continually grow a knowledge of how they may benefit Xero.

• Lead the development of a Xero engineering culture where teams take pride in the quality of the software they produce and the impact it has on customers.

• Lead initiatives to improve on-boarding, on-going training, knowledge sharing, and other important aspects of knowledge work and collaboration between teams.

• Be accountable for ensuring that Xero’s people management processes are followed, including personal development plans, objectives and key results, performance management, regular 1:1s, succession planning etc for your direct and indirect reports.

Success looks like

The teams under your remit are:

• Continuously delivering high quality software to production, meeting timeline commitments and meeting our customers needs and is aligned to Xero’s growth strategy.

• Clearly understand the products they own and are taking responsibility for the operation and ongoing improvement of those products.

• Have a clear understanding of what they are working on, why they are doing that work, what is expected of them and what opportunities are available for them in the future.

• Strong culture where teams take pride in what they produce and in the ‘craft‘ of software development. We have a reputation for being a great place to work for engineers and staff retention is high.

• As a “leader of leaders” you have grown and continue to sustain a strong leadership culture.

• You’ve successfully built trust and positive working relationships across all levels of the business.

• The quarterly roadmap takes into account the required variety of work that needs to be completed as well as the importance of reducing risks and technical debt. This includes security, compliance and delivery tasks.

What you’ll bring with you

Critical competencies

• Visionary leadership with a strong technical and product mindset

• Customer obsession

• Data driven decision making balanced with a bias for action

• Great stakeholder management and communication skills

• Consistently hires top-tier talent

• Builds strong organizations, constantly growing leaders.

• Strong operational excellence and reliability

• Empathetic and people-focused leadership

Experience

• 15+ years with on and with large scale technology systems, at least 7 of them leading teams at scale

• Strong technical foundation and demonstrated experience building and scaling web-scale systems

• Demonstrated experience in design and implementation of data systems

• Experience with large organization management (150+ Engineers) across global sites

• Experience working with legacy systems as well as launching new systems