SRE Engineering Manager: Reliability & Incident Leader

Xero; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work arrangement

Job summary

Xero is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in Australia. You will lead reliability efforts across APAC and EMEA, drive HA/DR testing, and manage incident response, partnering with platform teams and observability specialists to reduce customer incidents.

You will mentor engineers, shape the engineering culture, and expand the SRE team from two to four engineers while maintaining strong incident response standards and a reliability-first mindset.

Qualifications

• proven SRE or infrastructure leadership experience, ideally managing incident command at scale, with a demonstrable track record of building or maturing HA/DR programmes.
• strong software engineering skills and are comfortable diving into code to solve reliability problems, not just process; fluency with AI-assisted tooling is a core capability, not a nice-to-have.
• agency and curiosity; proactive problem-solving and ownership across the business.
• excellent stakeholder management; influence peer teams across regions, platforms, and functions.

Responsibilities

• Building and maturing a continuous HA/DR testing cadence, moving from ad hoc to reliable weekly execution.
• Establishing and optimising incident command protocols across APAC and EMEA regions, with a focus on time-to-mitigation against clear targets.
• Closing cross-team reliability gaps identified between Observability, Tooling, and product engineering through structured collaboration.
• Growing the team from two to four engineers whilst maintaining high incident response standards and driving a reliability-first mindset.
• Mentoring engineers and shaping the team’s culture with structured onboarding and regular 1:1s.

Skills

SRE Leadership

Incident Command

HA/DR Programs

Software Engineering

Stakeholder Management

Cross-Regional Collaboration

Distributed Teams

AI-assisted tooling

Tools

AI-assisted tooling

Job description

Xero is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in Australia. You will lead reliability efforts across APAC and EMEA, drive HA/DR testing, and manage incident response, partnering with platform teams and observability specialists to reduce customer incidents.

You will mentor engineers, shape the engineering culture, and expand the SRE team from two to four engineers while maintaining strong incident response standards and a reliability-first mindset.