A DevOps Engineer at Xero plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of the cloud infrastructure that powers beautiful accounting software for millions of small businesses globally. At Xero, infrastructure is not just a support function; it is a core driver of product delivery and customer trust. You will be responsible for building and maintaining robust platform systems, automating complex workflows, and fostering a culture of continuous delivery and site reliability.

As a DevOps Engineer, you will collaborate closely with product developers, security teams, and product managers to design and implement cloud-native architectures. Your work directly impacts how quickly and safely Xero can ship new features to its users. Whether you are managing large-scale Kubernetes clusters, optimizing Terraform deployments, or championing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, your contributions will ensure that Xero remains highly available and secure.

This role requires a unique blend of systems engineering expertise, software development fundamentals, and a collaborative mindset. Xero values engineers who do not just write code or configure pipelines in isolation, but who actively seek to understand the broader business context, share knowledge with their peers, and continuously improve the developer experience across the organization.

The questions you will face during your interviews are representative of real challenges encountered by the platform and engineering teams at Xero. While the exact questions may vary depending on the specific team and location, they are designed to evaluate your technical depth, architectural reasoning, and behavioral alignment. The goal is to understand your problem-solving methodology rather than testing your ability to memorize specific syntax.

Infrastructure & Automation

These questions assess your hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, and automation tools.

• How do you manage and scale stateful applications within a Kubernetes cluster?
• Walk us through your strategy for structuring and managing state files in Terraform across multi-environment deployments.

Preparing for an interview at Xero requires a balanced approach that covers technical depth, architectural design, and collaborative behavioral skills. You should focus on demonstrating not just what you built, but why you built it and how you validated your decisions.

Technical Breadth & Depth – You must demonstrate a strong command of modern platform tools, including Kubernetes, Terraform, and Linux systems. Be ready to explain the underlying mechanics of these technologies, rather than just how to run basic commands.

SRE & Software Craftsmanship – Unlike traditional operations roles, Xero expects its DevOps Engineers to have a solid grasp of software engineering fundamentals. Brush up on SOLID principles, object-oriented programming (OOP), and common design patterns, as these are frequently evaluated during technical discussions.

Pragmatic Problem-Solving – When faced with open-ended technical or system design questions, focus on structured thinking. Clearly state your assumptions, ask clarifying questions, evaluate trade-offs, and design your solutions iteratively.

Collaborative & Human-Centric Values – Xero is highly collaborative. Interviewers will assess how you communicate complex technical concepts, how you work with cross-functional partners like product managers, and how you contribute to a positive, blameless engineering culture.

The interview process at Xero is designed to evaluate both your technical capabilities and your alignment with the company’s collaborative culture. The process is thorough but transparent, with recruiters providing clear expectations and feedback at each stage.

The journey typically begins with a conversational recruiter screening to discuss your background, interests, and overall alignment with the role. Depending on the region and specific team, you will then transition into a technical assessment. This may take the form of a structured online coding and configuration exercise (such as a CoderPad test covering Python, Kubernetes, and Terraform), or an open-ended technical discussion with senior engineers where you map out systems and discuss architectural trade-offs.

Following the technical assessment, you will participate in deeper technical and behavioral rounds. These discussions focus on your past project experience, SRE concepts, and software engineering principles like SOLID and OOP. The final stage often includes a conversation with a team lead, product manager, or general manager to assess your high-level system design capabilities, team-fit, and long-term career alignment within Xero.

This visual timeline illustrates the typical progression of a candidate through the Xero hiring pipeline. While the exact stages may vary slightly by region, you should expect a structured transition from initial screening to hands-on technical validation, followed by deep-dive architectural and behavioral interviews. Use this timeline to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time to both technical practice and behavioral storytelling.

Infrastructure-as-Code & Orchestration

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to design, deploy, and manage scalable cloud infrastructure. At Xero, infrastructure is managed programmatically, meaning your proficiency with automation tools is critical.

Be ready to go over:

• Terraform State & Modules – How to design reusable modules, manage state securely in a team environment, and handle drift.
• Kubernetes Architecture – Pod scheduling, service discovery, ingress controllers, custom resources, and cluster security.
• CI/CD Best Practices – Designing pipelines that incorporate automated testing, security scanning, and progressive delivery (e.g., canary deployments).
• Advanced concepts (less common) – GitOps workflows (e.g., ArgoCD or Flux), service mesh implementations, and writing custom Kubernetes operators.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a multi-region, highly available infrastructure deployment using Terraform and Kubernetes."
• "How would you migrate a legacy application from virtual machines to a containerized environment with zero downtime?"

SRE & Software Engineering Fundamentals

Xero expects its platform engineers to write high-quality, maintainable code. This area evaluates your understanding of software design principles and how they apply to systems engineering.

Be ready to go over:

• SOLID Principles – Applying Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, and Dependency Inversion principles to infrastructure code and automation scripts.
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) – Structuring automation tools and custom CLI utilities using clean OOP practices.
• Observability & Alerting – Defining meaningful SLIs and SLOs, configuring distributed tracing, and reducing alert fatigue.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Implementing self-healing infrastructure patterns and designing automated chaos engineering experiments.

Example scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would refactor a monolithic, hard-to-maintain deployment script using SOLID principles."
• "A critical service is experiencing intermittent latency spikes. How do you use observability data to isolate the root cause?"

System Design & Architecture

This area assesses your ability to design robust, scalable, and resilient distributed systems. Interviewers want to see how you approach ambiguity and make pragmatic engineering trade-offs.

Be ready to go over:

• Scalability & High Availability – Designing systems that can handle traffic spikes, implementing caching strategies, and avoiding single points of failure.
• Disaster Recovery – Defining RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective), and designing active-active or active-passive architectures.
• Cloud Networking & Security – VPC design, subnetting, IAM policies, and securing data in transit and at rest.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Designing for multi-cloud environments, zero-trust network architectures, and global database replication strategies.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a scalable log aggregation and analysis system that can process terabytes of data daily from hundreds of microservices."
• "How would you architect a secure, private connection between an on-premises data center and your cloud infrastructure?"