Engineering Manager

Overview

As Engineering Manager at Xero, you will lead a high-performing, inclusive team to deliver high-quality software while growing individuals and ensuring architectural excellence. You balance rapid product delivery with long-term reliability, guiding AI-native workflows and complex technical decisions to achieve business and customer outcomes. You’ll partner with Product and Design to shape solutions that matter, while maintaining a healthy, blameless culture and strong system health. This role offers impact at scale and the chance to influence how we modernise architectures and CI/CD maturity.

Pay / Benefits

• Great Place to Work UK accredited
• remote, hybrid or office-based roles
• office locations in London, Milton Keynes, Manchester
• boost days for connection and collaboration

Responsibilities

• Lead delivery and act as technical anchor to ensure predictable roadmap attainment
• Coach, mentor, and performance-manage engineers and build team capability
• Translate business goals into executable engineering plans balancing short-term delivery and long-term sustainability
• Write, review, and guide production code with credibility to inform engineering decisions
• Oversee design and operation of high-scale, high-availability distributed systems and incident response
• Drive adoption of AI-native engineering workflows to improve productivity and quality
• Collaborate with Product and Design partners to shape impactful customer solutions
• Advance CI/CD maturity and modernise architectures to reduce operational risk
• Drive visibility into system health and manage technical debt for proactive improvements

Key requirements

• Extensive professional software engineering experience with track record of delivering complex systems
• Proven experience leading, coaching, and performance-managing engineers
• Experience translating business goals into executable engineering plans
• Hands-on production code experience and technical credibility to guide decisions
• Experience building and supporting high-scale, high-availability distributed systems, including incident response
• Experience leading adoption of AI-native engineering workflows to improve productivity and quality

• Leadership and people management
• Clear communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams
• Blameless problem-solving and high-trust culture
• AI-native engineering workflows
• CI/CD maturity and DevOps practices
• Designing and maintaining high-scale distributed systems

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