Principal Engineer

Xero•Vancouver, BC

2d•CA$227,700 - CA$284,600•Hybrid

About The Position

You will work in collaboration with multiple engineering teams across the product group to guide, inspire, and elevate technical excellence. Shaping group-wide technical strategy, you will bridge organizational boundaries and partner with senior leaders to turn complex requirements into scalable, resilient software solutions. Through data-driven decision-making, you will guide architectural direction, elevate engineering practices, and mentor technical talent. Your focus will be on solving large-scale systems challenges while enabling teams to deliver value to small businesses safely, securely, and swiftly. You will join a cross-functional engineering collective made up of product management, architecture, and core delivery teams. Together, the group collaborates to build robust cloud-native applications, sharing knowledge through active communities of practice. The team works in a supportive, high-trust environment where open communication, continuous learning, and continuous improvement drive day-to-day work. Initially, the role will focus on modern cloud platforms, automated CI/CD pipelines, and microservice architectures, refactoring legacy services and enhancing system scalability, performance, and security standards, defining portfolio-wide technical frameworks, SLOs, and strategies to quantify and address technical debt, and mentoring lead engineers and driving cross-team quality practices to simplify complex engineering workflows.

Requirements

Demonstrated leadership in guiding large-scale cloud native software projects to successful delivery.
Proven success mentoring engineers and fostering inclusive, psychologically safe team environments.
Strong ability to shape long-term architectural vision while effectively balancing technical debt with product delivery.
Expertise in automating delivery tooling, establishing quality standards, and refining operational metrics.
Skilled at communicating nuanced technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and executive leaders.

Responsibilities

Guide, inspire, and elevate technical excellence across multiple engineering teams.
Shape group-wide technical strategy.
Bridge organizational boundaries and partner with senior leaders.
Turn complex requirements into scalable, resilient software solutions.
Guide architectural direction through data-driven decision-making.
Elevate engineering practices.
Mentor technical talent.
Solve large-scale systems challenges.
Enable teams to deliver value to small businesses safely, securely, and swiftly.
Focus on modern cloud platforms, automated CI/CD pipelines, and microservice architectures.
Refactor legacy services and enhance system scalability, performance, and security standards.
Define portfolio-wide technical frameworks, SLOs, and strategies to quantify and address technical debt.
Mentor lead engineers.
Drive cross-team quality practices to simplify complex engineering workflows.