GM/VP Data Engineering

About Xero and Our Purpose

At Xero, our mission is to enhance the lives of small business owners, their advisors, and communities globally. By increasing small business efficiency daily, linking them with enterprise-grade technology, and empowering a vibrant community, we unlock limitless potential. Our efforts support small business success and contribute to economic strengthening worldwide.

Your Impact as GM of Data Engineering

Leading Xero's enterprise-wide data engineering function, you will transform our data strategy into actionable operating frameworks and a coherent platform plan. This includes executing prioritized initiatives on self-service, governance, adaptive capability, and platform reliability.

Your team will be central to Xero’s AI evolution, delivering agentic-first data platforms, key data products, engineering standards, governance-embedded controls, and specialist capabilities ensuring safe, dependable, and scalable data use. As a visible enterprise leader, you will facilitate collaboration removal, leadership capability enhancement, and the development of a trustworthy and economically viable data platform that underpins reliable analytics, self-service solutions, and AI-driven experiences.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive implementation of the Data Engineering strategy, ensuring shared platforms support trusted analytics, self-service, and agentic features across Xero.
• Collaborate with domain data and analytics teams, enabling them to own outcomes while providing essential platform capabilities, ingestion, modeling standards, shared products, and necessary governance.
• Navigate organizational, strategic, and technical uncertainties by making informed trade-offs balancing reliability, delivery speed, customer value, compliance, and commercial results.
• Ensure operational excellence through defined runbooks, monitoring dashboards, escalation protocols, clear ownership, health assessments, and measurable service level expectations for critical platforms.
• Build and nurture a high-performing leadership team within Data Engineering, fostering growth through team design, recruitment, succession planning, coaching, and cross-functional partnerships.
• Clarify roles and priorities to minimize dependency on key individuals, promote a culture valuing engineering quality, operational discipline, continuous improvement, and professional development.
• Establish strong partnerships across Xero leadership, removing collaboration barriers and influencing cross-organizational initiatives.
• Represent Data Engineering in senior leadership discussions, operational planning, and cross-functional forums, providing balanced, data-informed insights for decision-making.

Indicators of Success

• Clear ownership and trusted collaboration in Data Engineering for platform stewardship, engineering quality, and priority outcomes.
• Scalable, secure agentic insights and self-service capabilities delivered with operational credibility.
• Continual simplification of Xero’s data environment via standardized data ingestion, improved visibility, legacy system retirement, and effective platform standardization.
• Domain data teams own outcomes with enabling platform functionality and embedded governance to reduce manual efforts and risks.
• Strong leadership pipeline with diminished single-person dependencies and clear execution ownership.

Desired Qualifications and Competencies

• Documented success leading medium to large engineering teams and achieving ambitious strategic goals over 1-2 years.
• Excellent strategic insight and ability to translate company goals into practical plans and prioritizations.
• Substantial background in data engineering, platform leadership, or related technical domains with sufficient technical knowledge to evaluate architecture, operations, and financial impacts.
• Proven capacity to steer through ambiguity, simplify challenges involving multiple stakeholders, and generate momentum.
• Strong persuasive and communication skills, including executive communication and compelling narrative development.
• Experience building and mentoring teams, identifying future leaders, and enhancing organizational processes and collaboration methods.
• Good commercial acumen linking technical investments to customer outcomes, market conditions, and financial metrics.
• Balanced judgment to manage long-term platform robustness, governance, and reliability alongside agility, user impact, and business realities.