Engineering Manager (Front-End) - Small Biz Experience

The role / impact

This is not a typical Engineering Manager (EM) role. As EM for the Small Business Experience (SBEX) team, you will be at the centre of a significant engineering challenge at Xero: improving the competitiveness of Xero's front end across the entire platform.

You will lead a horizontal engineering team whose internal customers are every development team at Xero. Your work will directly shape how fast Xero's engineers can build, how performant Xero's products feel to customers, and how effectively the organisation can ship features once across web and mobile. This is an opportunity to drive broad technical impact — not just within a single product or squad.

You will build and lead the team from the ground up, setting the technical direction, and embedding engineering practices that raise the bar for front-end development. Your front-end engineering background will be central to how you lead giving you the credibility to guide architectural decisions, mentor engineers through complex challenges, and shape a technical strategy the team can rally behind. Alongside that technical depth, your people leadership experience will be equally important: this team needs a leader who can hire well, develop talent, and build a high-trust culture from day one.

The team / how they connect

The SBEX team is a horizontal enablement team working across Xero to improve front-end competitiveness. Your internal customers are other engineering teams across Xero. Your external customers are the small business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers who rely on Xero to run their businesses. Getting the front end right — fast, consistent, observable, and maintainable is what makes both groups' lives better.

The team is currently focusing on

• Contribute to and execute on a unified front-end strategy to address tech diversity across Xero's stack, moving toward a faster, more consistent platform

• Improving page performance and latency in a systematic way, defining metrics, identifying bottlenecks, and driving sustainable improvements rather than one-off fixes

• Building missing capabilities, to unlock new product experiences across Xero

• Improving front-end observability so engineering teams have the visibility they need to operate and improve their products with confidence

• Championing AI-assisted engineering workflows to reduce toil and increase velocity across the SDLC

Where and how you can work

This role can be based in Melbourne or Sydney, or remote along the Australian east coast. We support flexible working arrangements that balance team connection with the autonomy to work from where you are most effective.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• A strong front-end engineering background, whether built through previous hands-on experience or through leading front-end engineering teams closely, with enough technical depth to guide architectural decisions, earn credibility with your engineers, and shape a front-end strategy with confidence

• Demonstrated people leadership experience, including a track record of hiring, coaching, and performance-managing engineers, and building high-trust, high-performing team cultures

• Experience owning or leading cross-cutting front-end work such as shared libraries, design systems, platform tooling, or performance initiatives that had impact beyond a single team or product

• A proven record of influence across teams and disciplines without direct authority, establishing standards, driving adoption, and improving the developer experience at a broader organisational level

• Strong delivery management, with the ability to translate business goals into clear engineering plans and ship predictably in fast-paced, evolving environments

• A practical and considered approach to AI-assisted engineering, with experience or genuine curiosity around embedding AI workflows meaningfully into how a team builds software

• Familiarity with React Native or cross-platform development is a plus

Apply even if your experience isn't 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.