Staff Data Scientist

THE ROLE

As a Staff Data Scientist in the Product Data Science & Engineering team, you'll own end to end science roadmaps for a product domain, partnering with Product, Engineering and Design to frame problems, define success metrics and drive experimentation from discovery through to decision and iteration. You'll lead the measurement strategy for your area, shape how AI is applied to analytics and agentic use cases, and act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders on the most complex and ambiguous problems in your space.

Beyond your own domain, you'll build reusable analytical assets that get adopted across pods, mentor data scientists coming up around you, and help shape the standards and tooling for the wider data science community at Xero. This is a role for someone who wants their thinking to extend well past their own desk.

THE TEAM

Product Data Science & Engineering partners closely with Product, Engineering and Design across Xero's product and technology functions, driving decision making, experimentation and measurement. The team is moving from a service oriented analytics group into a product building function, increasingly responsible for designing and productionising AI driven analytics experiences, including agentic solutions. Sitting within a design led organisation, the team brings a strong customer and product orientation to everything it builds.

THE TEAM IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON

• Defining measurement, evaluation metrics and guardrails for AI powered product features and agentic experiences

• Productionising decision, ranking or risk models in partnership with engineering

• Building and extending reusable analytical assets, including canonical metrics and experimentation tooling

• Establishing patterns for using AI and automation to accelerate the team's own workflows

WHERE AND HOW YOU CAN WORK

Xero offers a flexible hybrid working model designed to blend the collaboration of office life with the autonomy of remote work. You will have access to our modern office spaces, with expectations around office days and collaborative 'boost days' aligned to help your team connect and ship great code effectively.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• You bring strong SQL and Python skills alongside a solid statistical foundation, including experimentation and causal methods

• Working across Snowflake, dbt and Git feels natural to you, and you're comfortable with CI/CD practices for code

• You've productionised models or decision systems alongside engineering teams, whether that's scoring, risk, ranking or propensity work

• Influencing senior partners across Product, Engineering and Design comes naturally, and you know how to align people on decision criteria and trade-offs

• Mentoring and coaching other data scientists is something you genuinely enjoy, not just a box to tick

• A tertiary qualification in a quantitative discipline, along with significant experience in data science or applied science, rounds out your background

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.