James Christou
Engineering Manager - Mobile | Xero
About
I’m an Engineering Leader with more than 9 years experience leading cross functional, agile, product development teams. My passion is building thriving, autonomous teams that have a strong sense of ownership and accountability, enabling them to deliver consumer facing applications that scale and that are loved by their users.
Work Experience
October 2022 – Present
Engineering Manager | Mobile
As a Engineering Manager in Mobile, I lead a group of two cross functional, agile pods that provide foundational capabilities, components, infrastructure and guidance to the other mobile pods building the Xero Accounting App. I am responsible for a total of 15 people in my group and each of the two pods has a Engineering Team Lead, Lead Engineer and Product Manager. One pod is a mix of iOS and Android engineers, and the other pod are .NET engineers working on the mobile BFF. I also have a Principal Engineer in my group to support technical strategic direction. The mission of our group is to enable the product pods to build the Xero Accounting App at scale. In this role I'm part of the broader Mobile Leadership Team which includes responsibilities like setting and reviewing portfolio wide OKRs, making prioritisation decisions across the portfolio and running Town Halls and AMAs.
Highlights
- Collaborated with the Principal Product Manager to establish and grow the group, set the group mission and purpose, develop the group's strategy and lead associated change activities
- Ownership of one of the mobile portfolio OKRs related to modernisation which will improve our ability to deliver new value to customers faster
- I successfully made the case to convert a short term API modernisation team to become long term owners of our Mobile API
- Worked with the Head of Engineering and finance on business casing secure additional headcount and funding for the group for tooling such as Bitrise (iOS CI/CD)
March 2022 – October 2022
Engineering Manager | Mobile Platform
As Engineering Manager for Mobile Platform, I led a group comprised of two cross functional, agile pods of iOS and Android engineers responsible for libraries related to identity, analytics, design system, and tooling such as CI/CD. These libraries and tooling enable Mobile engineers at Xero to build apps more securely, consistently and productively and help setup mobile engineering for scale across Xero. In this role I'm part of the broader Mobile Leadership Team which includes responsibilities like helping to set and review portfolio wide OKRs, making prioritisation decisions across the portfolio and running Town Halls and AMAs.
Highlights
- Led a working group established to solve ownership challenges in our mobile pods and improve our ability to scale our people, teams and software. We proposed a Team Topologies based approach to ownership. This has resulted in clearer ownership boundaries across pods and strong ownership of all the responsibilities required to build, operate and scale the Xero Accounting App.
- Led through a period of significant attrition in the Mobile Platform pods which resulted in having to take the pods through significant change including merging of pods and a change in strategic direction
September 2020 – March 2022
Development Team Leader | Mobile
I led a cross functional product development team focused on the contacts experience in the Xero Accounting App. The team was comprised of iOS, Android and API engineers, a Product Owner and a Product Designer. We collaborated together to solve user problems and to build and deliver features on both iOS and Android apps. I worked closely with the other product development teams in Mobile and across Xero to ensure we can continue to scale and deliver new value sustainably.
Highlights
- Part of an enablement team setup to improve how mobile teams are supported to own their job to be done
- Part of the Mobile Strategy working group which identified key initiatives to support our strategy execution
- Led improvements to how we create awareness, learnings and actions from incidents in Mobile
- Part of team Xinder which won the Innovation category at an internal hackathon
January 2015 – September 2020
Team Leader | Editorial Squad
In my role as Team Leader of the Editorial Squad, I led a cross functional product team responsible for the Retail Editorial Platform at carsales. My team comprised of 4 Full Stack Software Engineers, a Product Manager, a QA Engineer and a part time designer. The Retail Editorial Platform enables carsales editors to deliver amazing content to users across all device types and 11 brands in Australia and Latin America including https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/, https://www.bikesales.com.au/editorial/, https://www.boatsales.com.au/editorial/ and https://soloautos.mx/noticias/.
My team was responsible for managing the Wordpress based CMS that the editors use to create content and the associated publishing pipeline for distributing this content to downstream API's and retail applications. The platform was built for scale, resilience and performance and used a microservices architecture running in AWS.
The responsibilities of my role included delivery, architecture, technical leadership, code reviews, mentoring, team, project and stakeholder management, cross team collaboration, system health and SLOs, SEO and web analytics. We operated with a build and own mindset and were directly responsible for over 40 separately deployable components.
Highlights
- Led the creation of a microservices based Editorial Platform
- Led the team to internationalise the Editorial Platform including all customer facing experiences, publishing and the CMS
- Led the team to rebuild Owner Reviews, a platform where carsales users can submit reviews of their vehicle
- Owned engineering strategy for Editorial and got buy in at the C suite and with engineering leadership
- Hands on development in ASP.NET Core, React, PHP, Wordpress, Node, Web Components, AWS ECS/Lambda/API Gateway/S3
- Introduced Web Components to reuse components across experiences built in React, Angular or ASP.NET Core
- SEO optimization of our editorial sites to grow organic traffic
- Reduced operational spend by optimizing applications and architecture for the cloud and by moving from .NET Framework to containerised .NET Core applications
- Managed suppliers such as our Wordpress hosts WP Engine
- Recruited, onboarded and helped grow multiple highly talented engineers
- Helped to champion the use of OKRs
- Chief editor of the carsales Product & Technology blog - https://medium.com/carsales-dev/
- Team Leader of team Carpay which won the overall prize at the carsales Hackathon July 2019
- Part of the carsales team which won the Google AMP Hackathon 2018
November 2013 – January 2015
Senior Full Stack Engineer | Membership Squad
This is where I really learned my craft as a Software Engineer and where I learned to build applications that scale. I very quickly became expert at properly using SOLID principles, dependency injection, unit testing, design patterns and architectural patterns for distributed systems and the importance of culture to a team and an organisation.
Highlights
- Built features and applications using ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, SQL Server, Mongo DB
- Built part of the web experience for Owner Reviews, allowing users to search and view car reviews written by other users
- Used a microservices architecture
April 2011 – October 2013
Senior Analyst Programmer
I worked on various Web, API and ETL projects, all using the Microsoft stack and mostly as a project technical lead.
Highlights
- Built features and applications using ASP.NET MVC 3, WCF, jQuery, SQL Server
- Built data pipelines using SSIS, CLR
- Introduced dependency injection, unit testing and CI/CD to new projects
January 2007 – March 2011
Analyst Programmer
I worked on various ETL and web development projects for clients and became highly skilled at optimizing SQL for very large databases.
Highlights
- ASP.NET Web Forms
- SSIS
- ETL
- SQL Server
January 2004 – June 2007
Software Engineer
I managed the development of Lasercam, a hand held, laser based, mobile speed enforcement system and demonstrated this product to various customers around Australia and in the USA. I worked on various projects to help deliver enforcement systems for customers, including leading a team of 3 to successfully develop and deliver a new fixed site, laser based speed camera system for a customer in the USA.
Highlights
- ASP.NET
- SQL Server
- Visual C++/COM/DCOM
- C
- VB6
Awards
-
November 2020
Xero
Hackathon Winner Innovation Category Xero GSUP Hackathon 2020
Part of the Xinder team that took out this award category
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July 2019
carsales
Hackathon Winner carsales July 2019
Led a team of 13 at the July 2019 carsales Hackathon. The team won 2 out of 4 categories including the overall winners.
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May 2018
Google
Hackathon Winner Google AMP Hackathon 2018
Part of a carsales dev team that built a Google AMP based version of our editorial sites at a competitive hackathon at Google's Sydney office.
Contact
Melbourne AU
Education
-
1998 2003
The University of Melbourne
Bachelors
Software Engineering
Skills
Engineering Leadership
Growing people & teams
Change leadership
Engineering strategy
Stakeholder management
Agile practices
Architecture
Senior
Microservices
Distributed systems
Event driven architecture
Microfrontends
Serverless
Cloud native
Serverside
Senior
C#
ASP.NET Core
ASP.NET MVC/Web API
PHP
Wordpress
Docker
RabbitMQ
Node.js
Elasticsearch
Databases
Senior
SQL Server
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Redis
AWS
Senior
AWS S3
AWS Gateway
AWS ECS
AWS Lambda
AWS DynamoDB
Frontend
Mid
Javascript
React
CSS
SASS
Webpack
jQuery
Web components
Analytics & Monitoring
Google Analytics
Mixpanel
Sumologic
New Relic
Publications
How I Learned to Stop Fearing Deployments
15 May 2023
Personal story of how I went from fearing deployments to embracing multiple deployments a day
How We Took Our Editorial Platform to the World
carsales
07 June 2019
Story of how we made the Retail Editorial Platform work for our sites in Latam
Interests
Listening to Podcasts
Tech Lead Journal | Henry Suryawirawan
How I Built This | Guy Raz
Masters of Scale | Reid Hoffman
Level-Up Engineering | Coding Sans
HBR IdeaCast | Harvard Business Review
Reading Books
My reading list: https://github.com/jameschristou/reading-list