Principal Engineer, Data Platforms

Key Skills

AWS, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery - CI/CD, DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes-K8s, Python Programming, Scala Programming

Job Description

As an experienced professional engineer, you will establish a highly collaborative approach to engage 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.

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
• Fully understanding the end to end Data platform(s) ecosystem, you will enable and engage users, engineers and architects to work together to rapidly solve problems, figuring out which methodologies to apply to the situation at hand, and creating new learning for the future.
• 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...

• Strong plus: basic analytical / Data Science experience (at least basic descriptive statistics)
• Strong 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. 
• Proven experience developing and maintaining Data Platform Services on Cloud Infrastructure
• Experience in defining, designing and maintaining large-scale enterprise Data Platforms and solutions
• Proven experience in operating at a senior technical level 
• Extensive experience in one or more programming languages
• Good understanding and experience measuring non-functionals, like reliability, availability, security and performance
• Proven experience facilitating discussions with technical and non-technical audiences
• Bachelor of Computer Science, or similar