Site Reliability Engineer

Title: Site Reliability Engineer

Location: Australia

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Engineering

Job Description:

The role / impact

Reliability is a top strategic priority at Xero, directly influencing customer trust across more than 3,000 services. In this Site Reliability Engineering role, you will help shift reliability into a front-row discipline, moving beyond reactive fixes to uncover and resolve systemic resilience challenges across our global platform. You will partner closely with product teams to design reliability by default, ensuring our systems withstand unexpected events while supporting millions of small businesses.

You will take ownership of platform health by building automated tooling, championing chaos engineering experiments, and identifying potential failures before they impact customers. From coordinating incident management rituals and post-incident analysis to introducing load-shedding mechanisms, your contributions will directly safeguard platform availability and elevate engineering practices across the organisation.

The team / how they connect

You will join a focused Site Reliability Engineering team spanning Australia and the United States, responsible for incident management strategy, artificial intelligence operations tooling, and high-availability frameworks. The team works in close partnership with product and infrastructure squads across Xero, embedding alongside engineers to resolve shared reliability gaps and implement resilient design patterns. Together, the team shares incident commander responsibilities across regions, turning operational learnings into long-term systemic stability.

The team is currently working on / Initially, you will focus on

• Working across a modern technical stack centred on Kubernetes, AWS (including ECS and managed services), Golang, Python, and C#.

• Developing custom Kubernetes operators to automate storage resizing, alert provisioning, and reliability-by-default capabilities for development teams.

• Enhancing telemetry pipelines to extract AWS-specific metrics from managed services and route actionable alerts directly to product squads.

• Implementing chaos engineering scenarios to test infrastructure failure modes, alongside building API load shedding and rate limiting to protect services against traffic surges.

Where and how you can work

This role offers the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere in Australia, with office hubs available in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Whether you prefer working from home or coming into our collaborative spaces for team gatherings and boost days, we provide the autonomy to create a working routine that suits you best.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• You bring a solid background in site reliability engineering or DevOps, with experience diagnosing and strengthening distributed systems.

• You have practical experience managing containerised workloads in Kubernetes and running infrastructure on cloud platforms such as AWS.

• Your skillset includes practical coding proficiency in Golang, Python, or C#, coupled with curiosity for applying modern AI tools to operational challenges.

• You display strong agency and initiative, proactively identifying operational friction and proposing sustainable technical solutions without waiting for instruction.

• You demonstrate familiarity with incident management, participating in on-call responses and conducting post-incident reviews that translate into permanent fixes.

• You possess clear communication skills, consistently linking technical reliability investments directly to customer needs and measurable business outcomes.

Apply even if your experience isnt a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.