Our purpose

Small business makes the world go 'round – it's the heart of the global economy. At Xero we want millions of small businesses to thrive through beautiful software, advice and connections. We aim to make being a small business more efficient and profitable, and more enjoyable too.

How you'll make an impact

Xero's accounting and bookkeeping partners are a hugely important part of our business. At the heart of each accounting practice is the systems that support and drive making the practice's clients successful through efficient and effective tax and financial compliance.

As the Development Team Lead, you will be responsible for a team based in Denver that create value for our partners by building and enhancing the tools that make the magic happen. You will provide oversight and drive the success of our workpapers product, ensuring the right things are built at the right time and through doing so you'll contribute to Xero achieving its goals.

You'll be responsible for guiding products throughout the execution cycle, focusing specifically on analyzing, positioning, promoting and tailoring our platform so that make small businesses more effective.

The Development Team Lead is hands-on. They facilitate collaboration with engineers in the Pod, as well as product owners and designers, in order to solve interesting and challenging delivery problems. They assist in any way to have the development team deliver faster, better, happier.

• Faster - remove/improve unnecessary technical or process roadblocks that hold back the team
• Better - best practice code, in alignment with business priorities.
• Happier - feeling heard, productive, valued and are growing.

What you'll do

Team

• Contribute towards a culture of continuous improvement in your Pod
• Suggesting and facilitating process improvement experiments, measuring, adjusting, following up, and reporting back on success
• Ensure the team is supported and that help is proactively requested from supporting teams (e.g. Architecture, Security, Design, Agile, etc)
• Contribute towards a culture that recognizes and praises individual efforts and Pod successes
• Encourage & facilitate cross-pod communication and alignment within the larger team
• Ensure that technical progress created within the team is shared with the wider business

People

• Support your reports to continually improve and grow at Xero
  • Your reports are self-aware of their competencies - They actively seek feedback to improve their performance, take ownership of their personal development and learning activities
  • Encourage opportunities for personal development and learning activities by coaching your reports through their feedback and connecting them with relevant mentors in the organization
  • Effectively manage and support your reports to drive performance, culture and an inspiring environment
  • Conduct people-management related tasks such as leave and expense approval, training budget, performance and salary reviews etc.
  • All aspects of people management to engage, retain and develop staff (i.e. recruitment, performance feedback, staff training and career development, leave approval)
  • Work closely with the Development Manager to actively identify areas for improvement and help implement ideas
  • Work with your reports to get them to actively provide constructive feedback and create an open communication culture
  • Work closely with the Development Manager and the recruitment team to hire and onboard engineers across the Partner team where required
  • Ensure any individual performance deficiencies affecting the Pod are identified, brought to the attention of the relevant Development Manager and steps are put in place to rectify

Software Development

• Participate in a Pod as an individual contributor
• Lead complex development activities, working with their Pod to ensure acceptance criteria are met and in line with Xero's development team standards and procedures.
• Guide the delivery teams on build and deployment practices, with the aim of increasing pod autonomy
• Proactively identifies and resolves any architectural issues that impact the speed at which the development team can deliver features.
• Assist the Pod in understanding their non-functional requirements and coaching them on effective and compliant ways of meeting them
• Contribute to DevOps tasks

Technical Leadership

• Advocate for development and testing best practices in your Pods
• Play an active role collaborating with Architecture and other Technical Leaders or Team Leaders in Xero to ensure knowledge, engineering practices and patterns are shared
• Work with Product to ensure investments in preventative maintenance for deployables the Pod is responsible for appear at an appropriate level in the Pod's backlog
• Ensure prompt and sound technical decisions are made by the Pod to achieve business outcomes.
• Facilitating development of processes that guide technical decisions and empower developers to make autonomous decisions within those guidelines
• Facilitating and encouraging expert discussion with supporting teams (e.g. Architecture, Security, Design, Agile, etc.) with the team directly - not taking ownership of the discussion personally and becoming a knowledge conduit

Business

• Helping Product understand the customer impacts of technical decisions, and aiding them in analyzing priority of those decisions in a product decision framework
• Help the Pod and Product Owner meet service level objectives by ensuring appropriate monitoring and incident response processes are in place for any deployables the Pod is responsible for
• Be a conduit for communications to flow between the Pod and product leadership and portfolio leadership

Functional Relationships

• Pod team members
• Pod team leads
• Development Manager
• Product managers and product owners
• Design team members
• Agile coaches and facilitators
• Platform (e.g. SRE) and architecture teams

What you'll bring with you

• Delivery
  • Familiar with multiple software development methodologies and styles.
  • Ability to discern user requirements and develop specifications.
  • Ability to set and manage priorities judiciously.
  • Ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Is able to build trust and credibility with other Pod members and the Product Owner
  • You are able to work through ambiguous requirements and make decisions to push forward
• Sound technical skills
  • Mastery of C#, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and SQL Server.
  • Experience using AWS Toolchain.
  • Continuous deployment tools.
  • Have deep knowledge of how to write robust, maintainable applications, and how to build and work with distributed, high-volume backend services.
  • Have a great understanding of system design, data structures, object-oriented programming and software engineering principles, and understand how to apply them to design pragmatic solutions.
  • Care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code.
  • You have experience in identifying, debugging and resolving complex production issues
• Growing people is your passion
  • An ability to encourage and get the most out of other Pod members
  • Have been mentoring and supporting peers and engineering teams, particularly in reducing technical debt and complexity in applications.
  • Able to exercise discretion in relation to sensitive situations and information.
  • Ability to motivate in a team-oriented, collaborative environment.
  • You have good ideas and can inspire team to come up with better ideas.
• Humbleness and a growth mindset necessary to foster a continuous improvement culture, including the ability to improve yourself.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to interact with a variety of individuals at different levels.

Note: this is just a guide, things change often at Xero so we expect people to pick up anything else as directed by their manager.

What we offer

The opportunity to be part of a growing global success story; a fun, fast-paced work environment and a relaxed, supportive team which encourages personal growth; competitive salary, shares in the company; generous 4-weeks of PTO, 5 wellness days, standard holidays and office closure between Christmas and New Year's; flexible work arrangements and a plush new office environment in downtown Denver.

If you are ready to take on a new challenge in a fast-paced organization where the sky's the limit, we'd love to hear from you.