GM/VP Data Engineering

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Business Impact
• Partner with functional data and analytics teams so they increasingly own domain outcomes, while Data Engineering provides platform capability, ingestion, modelling patterns, shared products and guardrails where needed.
• Maintain a strong grip on operational health by ensuring critical platforms have clear runbooks, dashboards, escalation paths, ownership, health reviews and measurable service expectations.
• Lead and grow a strong leadership bench across Data Engineering and build the capabilities needed for current and future ambitions through team design, recruitment, succession planning, coaching and cross-functional collaboration.
• Build strong working relationships with leaders across Xero, removing barriers to collaboration and influencing outcomes well beyond your immediate reporting line.
• Lead data discussions in senior forums, operating-model conversations and cross-functional planning, bringing balanced judgement, context and data to difficult decisions.
• Success looks like
• Data Engineering has clear ownership boundaries and is a trusted collaborator for all things data, platform stewardship, engineering quality and delivery against the outcomes that matter most.
• Agentic insights and self-service capabilities scale in a way that is operationally credible, secure and useful, rather than fragmented or experimental for too long.
• The function scales through strong leaders and reduced single-threading, with better succession depth and clearer execution ownership.
• What you'll bring with you
• Critical competencies
• Proven experience leading medium to large engineering organisations and delivering results against strategic objectives over a 1-2 year horizon.
• Strong strategic and operating-model judgement, with the ability to turn broad company priorities into executable plans, trade-offs and sequencing.
• Deep experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or adjacent technical leadership domains, with enough technical fluency to assess archi

Benefits

Additional Information

Our Purpose At Xero, we're here to make life better for people in small business, their advisors and communities around the world. By making small businesses more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we're not only helping small businesses, we'll be building a stronger economy that can change the world. How you'll make an impact As GM of Data Engineering, you will lead Xero's shared data engineering function to turn Xero-wide data strategy into an executable operating model, a coherent platform strategy, and a disciplined sequence of bets across self-service, governance, agentic capability and platform reliability . You and your team will be at the forefront of Xero's internal AI transformation, providing agentic-first data platforms, core data products, engineering patterns, governance-by-design controls, and specialist delivery capability that let Xero use data safely, reliably and at scale. You will act as a visible enterprise leader, removing barriers to collaboration across Xero, lifting capability through other leaders, and shaping a trusted, reliable and economically sound data platform environment that supports trusted analytics, self-service, and AI experiences.

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