Principal Engineer - Reporting & Insights

ABOUT THE ROLE Millions of small businesses and their advisors use Xero reports and insights to decide what to do next. AI is changing how people understand their finances faster than any shift since the cloud, and Reporting & Insights is where Xero meets that change. Over the next few years we’re evolving reporting and insights for the agentic era, where customers ask an AI about their numbers as often as they open a Balance Sheet. As the senior technical leader for Reporting & Insights, you’ll set the multi-year technical direction, from the reports businesses file to the insights that tell them what to do next. You’ll also help hire the first Reporting & Insights engineers in Vancouver and decide how they work. THE TECHNICAL CHALLENGES Set a 3-year architecture across Reporting & Insights. Reporting and Xero Analytics run on a mix of modern services and systems that have grown with Xero over many years. You’ll define one target state across both, decide how they build on Xero’s data platform, and secure the investment to get there. You’ll design for high throughput, low latency and resilience, so reporting and insights scale with Xero’s largest and most complex customers. Evolve the platform without breaking trust. Accountants file tax returns from these numbers, so correctness comes first. You’ll lead the evolution of the data foundations behind about 150 reports, sequenced across teams and organisational boundaries. Customers keep the numbers they trust, on foundations built for what comes next. Make reporting and insights AI-native. AI changes what reporting and insights can be: answers to plain-language questions, insights that reach customers where they work, and analysis that once took an accountant hours. Every answer still has to reconcile to the ledger. You’ll define the foundations: how agents query financial data safely, how answers stay grounded and explainable, and how we prove correctness at scale. We want teams across Xero to build on what you create. IMPACT In your first six months you’ll own the Reporting & Insights architecture and set a direction for the data platform and the evolution of both products that engineering, Product and leadership back. At twelve months you will have: - Set a multi-year technical strategy for Reporting & Insights - Delivered new foundations for the first major report families, setting Reporting & Insights up for its next phase of growth - Opened Reporting & Insights to bigger businesses, with performance that scales to our largest customers - Put shared foundations for AI-native reporting and insights into production - Grown the Lead and Senior Engineers around you and raised the technical bar across the group Beyond year one, you’ll shape where Reporting & Insights goes next, and help steer Xero’s wider data and AI direction alongside the leadership team. OWNERSHIP You’re the senior technical voice for Reporting & Insights. You own the multi-year technical strategy and target architecture, and you make the calls that cross team and domain boundaries. You shape the roadmap with the GM and Product, decide where we invest in foundational capabilities, and align teams across regions behind one direction. You stay hands-on where it counts: reference implementations, foundational frameworks and the hardest architecture problems WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH You’ll report to the GM of Engineering. You’ll partner with the engineering managers and teams across Reporting & Insights, who know these products and their data in depth. You’ll shape the product and AI roadmap with the Reporting & Insights Product leads. You’ll also work with Principal Engineers and platform teams across Xero, including the accounting core and data platform teams that own systems we depend on. WHAT YOU BRING Must-have: - You’ve set technical strategy for a domain or portfolio over a 2 to 3 year horizon, and aligned multiple teams behind it. - You’ve led the evolution of a large, high-traffic, correctness-critical system across organisational boundaries. - You have depth in high-throughput, low-latency, resilient distributed systems and data-heavy architecture, and you still contribute hands-on where it matters. - You connect external shifts, AI above all, to product and architecture strategy, and you know where LLMs and agents belong in a system. - You grow leaders. You’ve mentored Lead and Senior Engineers into bigger roles, and your writing turns complex direction into decisions people act on. Nice to have: - Financial, reporting or analytics domain experience - LLM or agent-based features in production - .NET and AWS - A presence in the wider tech community through talks, writing or open source HOW WE WORK We’re bold in our vision and pragmatic in execution, delivering useful improvements along the way rather than waiting for a large rewrite. We invest in AI to learn faster and focus effort on higher-value problems, while engineers stay accountable for what they ship. We use shared frameworks to avoid reinvention, leaving teams room to innovate. Engineers own their work, including quality, reliability, and on-call. Leaders set context and priorities, and engineers help shape the solutions. WHERE WE WORK We offer a hybrid model that blends the flexibility of working from home with the collaboration of the office, including designated boost days in our modern office spaces. This role is open to hybrid candidates in Vancouver, British Columbia, or San Mateo, California. We also welcome applications from candidates across Canada interested in relocating to Vancouver, and from remote candidates in Seattle, Washington. OUR HIRING PROCESS 1. TX phone screen (45 minutes): a conversation with your Talent Specialist about your background, motivations and the role. 2. Technical assessments: a coding assessment and a systems design assessment, run through an independent third-party provider and based on real-world scenarios. 3. Technical deep dive (45–60 minutes): with a