Senior Applied Scientist-ml

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

How you’ll make an impact

Xero views the application of intelligent, data-driven products and services at scale as a key competitive advantage for our business, now and into the future. 

As a Senior Applied Scientist you will work closely with your colleagues from across the business to refine tough problems that can be solved with the application of scientific thinking, algorithms and analytical data processing.  

As a champion of Xero’s values, you will contribute to our culture of collaboration, mutual respect, healthy skepticism, and embracing a growth mindset. You’ll mentor and coach individuals and work to grow the scientific competency across Xero.

As part of a cross-functional team including engineers, designers and product owners you will build and operate beautiful, intelligent products and services that delight our users everyday.

What you’ll do

• Science
• Immerse yourself in Xero’s data, wrangling often complex and messy data and drive our ability to extract value from data
• Continually provide feedback on how we can improve the quality of our data and its coverage of our core products/services
• Lead applied research programs that underpin development of new products and features within Xero, driving the rigorous application of scientific methods at every stage of the development process
• Stay up to date with the latest developments within your domain of applied science, and distill these developments into new approaches that can be applied within Xero
• Act as an educator and evangelist to raise literacy around  data and your domain of applied science, mentoring and developing members of the team and wider Xero. Engineering- Drive adoption of  high coding standards, collaborating with engineers to produce robust and reproducible code aligned with delivering high-quality products
• Contribute to our research tooling and work to scope and implement improvements
• Together with other engineers, maintain and operate the end-to-end pipelines that support data-intensive applications at Xero. Problem Definition- Lead the translation of business problems into applied research tasks that deliver value through experimentation and analysis
• Champion a customer-focused mindset that links applied research to ethics and achieving positive, tangible real-world outcomes for our customers Influence- Represent Xero’s values through your work and interactions with collaborators across Xero, delivering high quality work with integrity
• Communicate your findings to a diverse set of stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds
• Participate in and help shape our recruitment processes, helping Xero grow diverse and world-class talent in Applied Science
• Represent Xero externally by speaking at public forums (Meetups, lectures, etc) to raise awareness of the work we do and build our hiring brand
• Cultivate Xero as a great place to work, embracing a growth mindset, intellectual rigour, humility, curiosity, and mutual respect.

Success looks like

• We are creating #beautiful data products and delivering real value through thoughtful user experiences
• Our products use the appropriate machine learning methods to solve customer problems — simple where it works, complex where it’s needed
• Our standards and practices are consistent with delivering high quality work while minimising unnecessary friction
• Across the business, Xeros are growing in their ability to identify problems that can be solved through quantitative sciences, and where appropriate are collaborating with the Data team to evaluate and refine these ideas
• Xero is growing its track record and reputation for delivering data products and executing on applied research projects
• We are building momentum across the data lifecycle, as teams across the business are committed to improving data quality and Xero is realizing the value from that data
• We are a great place to work, and scientists are engaging cross-functionally and continuously deepening their understanding of their field and appreciation for other disciplines
• Xero is a destination of choice for scientists seeking interesting, impactful, and meaningful applied research work in the technology sector

What you’ll bring with you

• Comfortable managing ambiguity on a research program, creating appropriate processes for managing risks and coordinating dependencies
• Ability to break down large problems into smaller, more manageable tasks that enable teams to work efficiently
• Ability to collaborate with other technical team members with different skill sets, coupled with a willingness to broaden skills
• Strong team-level project management skills, able to balance business objectives, research demands, and team development when delivering programs of work
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with both collaborators and executive stakeholders
• Expert-level hands-on skills in a domain of applied science (defined in the technical addendum)
• Track record in delivering real-world impact through applied science, taking research and development from theory to deployment
• Have played a leadership role on a cross-functional team to deliver a system that solves a problem
• Track record in developing both technical and non-technical skills of teams and mentees