Engineering Team Lead, TaxCycle

What you’ll do

• Engineering
• Maintain a positive and constructive relationship between yourself, your product peers, and your team.
• Ensure your team’s delivery pipeline is flowing at a predictable and sustainable pace, raising and addressing blockers as appropriate.
• Ensure accurate, fit for purpose and sustainable delivery systems exist in your team. You'll be responsible for your team providing informed estimates, delivery forecasting, capacity planning, and associated reporting.
• Ensure the health of all the teamʼs products is well understood by the team, discoverable by the wider organization, and able to be addressed, should problems occur.
• Understand and advocate the Xero Engineering Standards. Working as part of a leadership group, you’ll facilitate an engineering approach that is compliant to these standards and fosters sustainably excellent engineering
• Working with your peers in Product and your team, assist in the development roadmaps and plans which effectively and efficiently deliver business outcomes.
• Maintain a current knowledge of engineering technologies used in the development of Xero’s software applications. Stay up-to-date with emerging engineering practices, techniques and frameworks.
• Work with engineers and CX teams to troubleshoot and resolve production issues, where appropriate. Ensure that post-incident learnings are collected and actioned.
• Coach and enable your team toward effective and efficient delivery
Culture & People
• As required, lead, develop and grow a high performing team through coaching, mentoring and setting a clear direction by connecting the work they do to the Technology and Xero’s strategic objectives.
• Support each member of your team to identify, grow and develop engineering capabilities and overall personal development and work with them to understand career growth opportunities
• Build strong relationships with stakeholders to develop a high performing cross functional leadership team at the pod level
• Have authentic conversations around your peoples’ wellbeing, capabilities and engagement
• Attract, recruit and retain capable individuals, building on and complementing the diversity of teams
• Execute and improve talent management initiatives and processes within your team such as recruitment, growth and performance management. Drive a culture of engagement and improvement, making sure the team understands how they help our customers and our business achieve great outcome
• Create a culture of psychological safety and inclusion. Ensure the health of your team is monitored, that all members of your team are empowered to raise ideas and concerns, and that everyone contributes to improvements in how the team works together
• Driving continuous improvement through reviewing, developing and implementing best practice ways of working.
• You will facilitate team events such as off-sites, days out, team building activities etc.
•  Help to cultivate a fun, appreciative, rewarding, innovative and results-driven culture that lives and breathes our Xero values.

Success looks like

• Engineering
• Your team:
• Builds software products that customers love, that meet customer outcomes and that comply with Xero’s engineering standards and principles.
• Is well connected to other Technology and Product teams to inform and support cross team planning and delivery.
• Maintains a predictable and sustainable pace of high quality, software delivery. Contributes to understanding and communicating technical risks
• Accurate and timely information is provided to Product team members and other stakeholders to enable them to set timeframes and/or scope expectations
• Team ceremonies follow agile/lean best practices and support delivery and collaboration.
Culture and People
• Your reports:
• Clearly understand how the work they perform contributes to the overall success of the Technology team and Xero. 
• Clearly understand their areas of development and their personal growth opportunities. Their performance is reviewed regularly and feedback is continually provided in a timely manner
• Are empowered and challenged to do their best work and their skills are continuously being developed through new learnings and experiences.
• Are aware of opportunities to work with wider Xero communities and groups to foster consistent practice, breakdown silos and share local learning globally.
• Are able to participate in communities and model a culture of sharing, inclusion and continuous improvement.
• Are well connected to other Technology and Product teams and drive incremental improvement in their product.
• Good performance is recognized and celebrated. Poor performance is managed promptly and effectively.
• You understand when your people are most engaged and are able to remove barriers to support them to do the best work of their lives
• Leave, expenses, and relevant processes are completed in a timely manner.

What you’ll bring with you

•  Coach & mentor - Utilizing software delivery, technical experience and expertise, offer the right knowledge, at the right time in the right way - understanding why and how people learn.
• Growth mindset - Understand that competency is not fixed but is enhanced through dedication and hardwork. Demonstrate a love of learning and resilience to adversity that is essential for great accomplishment.
• High EQ - Self aware, self regulated, motivated and empathetic, with great interpersonal skills.
•  Leading/living the vision & values - Build and foster an inclusive and positive team culture. Keep the team’s vision and values at the forefront of decision-making.Communicate and help others understand the importance of the vision and values. Translate the vision and values into day-to-day activities and behaviours.
• Have a good understanding of the importance of Xero's Engineering standards and practices and are able to coach teams to adhere to them.
• People Leadership - Demonstrate honesty and integrity.Provide objectives and goals with loose guidelines/directions. Clearly communicate expectations. Have an open mind and the flexibility to change opinions. Develop and support others
• Teamwork - Work with peers and stakeholders to establish an overall collaborative relationship
• Outstanding communication and time management skills.
• Experience of managing software delivery and/or other teams using Lean-Agile techniques.
• Background in software development with our tech stack (.Net, React, Typescript, Azure/AWS)
• Excellent grasp of modern software delivery practices and life cycle.
• Proven ability to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the business.
• Previously worked in a digital product or SaaS environment
• Experience with coaching and mentoring.
• Experience with Git flow lifecycle, project management tools like Jira, TFS, Confluence, SonarQube, New Relic/App Insights etc.