Senior Software Engineer - Data Applications

Last updated an hour ago
Location:Auckland
Job Type:Full Time
Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

About the team:

The Data team is responsible for driving the adoption of data driven decision making across Xero - for both our internal users and our global audience of small business owners, bookkeepers and accountants. We create, manage and deliver a wide range of data services including machine learning toolsets, frameworks, API prediction services, core reporting, key data dimensions, extensible and scalable analytical data processing and storage facilities. We are the centre of expertise for data architecture, data modeling, machine learning, ethical data usage and artificial intelligence service design. We also lead the work to raise the data and AI literacy levels across Xero with a particular focus on the product management and engineering cohorts globally.

About the role:

As a Senior Engineer in the Data Applications team you will lead the design and build of the data pipelines and applications that will enable Xero to bring intelligent, insightful products and beautiful experiences to millions of customers around the world.

As a professional, commercially experienced software engineer you will provide technical leadership for a group of talented and enthusiastic engineers. You will set technical standards, coach, mentor and develop individuals to create a high calibre delivery capability with a specialisation in the design, build, operation and refinement of machine learning training and inference pipelines and frameworks at scale.

What you'll do:

  • Collaborate with colleagues from the Science, Evaluation & Measurement and Data Enrichment teams to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines for training and inference at scale.
  • Monitor, Maintain and Support the solutions you build including being part of an on-call roster should an urgent issue come up.
  • Work with colleagues to maintain and operate the Data team’s pipelines, with an emphasis on monitoring for changes in data quality.
  • From ideation to production enable the development of easy-to-use infrastructure, tooling and monitoring for data applications and reproducible data science workflows.
  • Stay current with emerging practices, techniques and frameworks in the fields of applied machine learning and artificial intelligence at scale.
  • Mentor and develop members of your team, increasing our capability to build and operate intelligent, data-driven, products and services in our core customer offerings.
  • Champion the ethical development of data processing systems which include ML/AI components and ensure your teams are always working with the best interests of our users in mind.

    • As the Senior Engineer, you'll also:

  • Actively contribute to improvements in our standards, processes and guidelines to accelerate our maturity, both within your team and across shared services of the data group and Xero technology groups.
  • Champion and guide the successful delivery of substantial outcomes as part of your team.
  • Develop a deep understanding of Xero's Domain and data strategy to help guide your teams daily activity and decisions.
  • Support our hiring and team building efforts, including the option to line manage other Engineers should you have the interest and aptitude.
  • Be the go to specialist in at least one area of relevant technology or functionality in our products.

    • What you'll bring with you:

  • Desire and appetite for writing clear, reusable and easily maintainable code that solves customers' problems through software.
  • Thorough understanding of the practices and components required to support machine learning pipelines in production.
  • Strong communication skills, both written and oral and the ability to translate between business and technical audiences.
  • Extensive experience coding in production and knowledge of application architecture.
  • Expert level hands on practitioner skills in a good selection of the following areas and the appetite to learn those which are unfamiliar:data architecture, solutions architecture, CI/CD, distributed computing, streaming data and machine learning frameworks.
  • Good understanding and experience measuring and designing for non-functionals, like reliability, availability, security and performance.
  • Experience driving delivery at a senior level as part of a team building and supporting their solutions in an agile delivery environment.
  • A track record of proposing and implementing improvements to technical approaches, processes and practices in areas of expertise.
  • Demonstrable experience in developing both training and inference systems for machine learning pipelines at scale.
  • Comfortable at the ‘nix command line and with AWS, Hive, Kinesis, Kafka, Kubernetes and an expert programmer in Python/Scala/Java/.Net
    • Why you should become a Xero

    It’s a diverse and inclusive environment, with people who will respect, challenge, support and mentor you to do the best work of your life. We’re a place where innovation and change are not only encouraged but also celebrated. We value our people and want them to enjoy and take pride in their work.

    We’re very supportive of flexible working arrangements and offer a competitive remuneration package including shares and life insurance, in addition to your base salary. We have a culture we’re proud of. Whether you're after a workplace with a social vibe, or a workplace which understands your family is priority - Xero is all of that and more.

    Xero is an NZ Immigration Accredited Employer and Rainbow Tick certified too.

    Please include a cover letter in your application, telling us why you’re a great fit for this position.