Staff ML Engineer

Our Purpose 

At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

The AI team at Xero brings together ML Engineers and Applied Scientists to build systems that power Xero's next generation of beautiful, insightful products.

About The Team

The AI Products group exists to collaboratively build products that use AI and ML to reduce toil and deliver the right insight at the right time. Working within the Data & Science team, you will join a diverse, globally distributed team of scientists, engineers, product managers, and analysts who help Xero turn data into beautiful, insightful products.

ML engineers design and build the infrastructure and services that power AI products that serve millions of customers every day. They also work closely with Applied Scientists through the research and development process to create harnesses and interfaces to safely take models from research to production environments. As a Staff ML Engineer, you will lead delivery programs and co-lead research programs that push the boundaries of what's possible with today's technology.

About The Role

• Leading the design of our AI research and production infrastructure and services, ensuring that our services scale while preserving flexibility for research teams
• Owning our strategy for managing the growth rate of technical debt and costs across our stack
• Making sure we're solving the right problems with the right methods
• Sharing knowledge with colleagues and lifting the bar for the AI Products team
• Working with teams across Xero to improve the quality and usability of data 
• Building Xero's profile in market through public facing content and events

About You

• You have 8+ years of experience delivering ML and AI products at scale
• You are drawn to solving hard problems and understanding how things work
• You are comfortable learning new frameworks (distributed processing, ML, etc) and applying them to real problems
• You are willing to dive into the unknown, and allow new information to change your decisions
• Constant learning and growth are an important part of who you are
• You are always willing to learn from others and ask for help

What you’ll Bring With You

• Strong coding and system design skills in Python or another language used in web scale data and AI applications
• Strong SQL skills and understanding of distributed processing (data, ML, etc)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for communicating technical concepts to technical and business stakeholders
• Experience developing sensible standards and mentoring early career ML engineers
• Familiarity with AI frameworks (PyTorch or Tensor-flow)  is a nice to have.
• Familiarity with MLFlow Tools a big plus

Why Xero?

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond, and that includes our candidates. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience, but you could be just the right person for this role. If you are excited about working at Xero, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, health insurance and dental reimbursement with vision allowances, a  healthcare spending account, fertility and family forming financial support, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with shared meals, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.