Eric Hislop

Part of the Dispatch Pod that builds and maintains Xero’s communication platforms, enabling internal product teams to connect with customers and their clients through email, SMS, and push notifications.

Key Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Xero SMS (beta): Working on the platform that enables product teams to send secure and timely SMS messages across AU, US, UK, and NZ. Currently supporting beta rollout for Invoicing and Payment links.

• Xero Mail: Maintaining the transactional email service that processes emails for Xero customers to their clients via the post.xero.com domain, and identity-related emails via identity.post.xero.com.

• Email Infrastructure: Integrating with Mailgun (Sinch) to send, receive, and track emails, handling enterprise-scale email delivery with safeguards for reliability and reputation through the Email Rate Limiting Service.

• Xero Push: Supporting the push notification service that provides lightweight, real-time updates to customers across applications.

• Team Mission: Delivering consistent, high-quality, and trusted solutions while empowering internal product teams to achieve their goals and making communications more efficient and effective.

Stepped into a 6-month secondment as Team Lead during a pivotal organisational shift at Xero - the introduction of a Change Approval Board (CAB) process. My team was instrumental in supporting this shift by driving adoption of Deployment Tracking across the company and delivering new tooling to support safer, more controlled production deployments.

Key Responsibilities & Achievements:

Technical Leadership:

• Led a cross-functional initiative to integrate deployment guardrails across GitHub Actions, TeamCity, and LaunchDarkly
• Collaborated closely with infrastructure, release, and platform teams to align on governance and rollout strategy
• Drove adoption of Deployment Tracking company-wide and delivered new tooling for safer deployments

People Leadership:

• Conducted regular 1:1s focused on career progression, wellbeing, and mentoring
• Facilitated goal-setting conversations and led performance reviews
• Participated in cross-team calibration to ensure fairness and consistency

Stakeholder Management:

• Presented updates and demos to senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders to maintain visibility and alignment
• Worked with Lead Engineers and Product Managers to ensure a clear, prioritised backlog
• Supported quarterly and annual planning processes

Impact: This role strengthened my leadership toolkit, particularly in balancing delivery with team development, and built my confidence navigating complex, fast-moving environments.

In the Engineering Practice Group at Xero, my focus was on maintaining and enhancing our internal developer portal, which catalogues all components at Xero and helps our engineers be more productive. I actively supported our transition to a SaaS-based developer portal (Cortex), facilitating data transfer and enhancing system functionality.

Key Responsibilities & Achievements:

Developer Experience:

• Modernised a deployment tracking tool (DeployTrack) and successfully rolled it out across Xero
• Worked on defining and measuring Engineering standards using the new internal developer portal
• Led Cortex projects to integrate services such as GitHub, Kubernetes, Google, Jira, and Slack, significantly improving the developer experience

Technical Implementation:

• Collaborated to maintain and enhance the internal developer portal, ensuring data quality and improving engineer productivity
• Contributed to the transition to the SaaS platform, developing specific data migration tools that ensure seamless data transitions and system integrations
• Engaged deeply with cloud technologies (AWS) and Kubernetes, enhancing ability to manage complex deployments

Advocacy & Training:

• Advocated for the Cortex Project, conducting numerous presentations and demos to increase engagement and support across teams
• Conducted workshops and training sessions on new tools and practices, raising team competence and facilitating a smooth transition to new platforms
• Broadened technical expertise across cloud infrastructure and container orchestration

Simply Energy Technology Team (Contact Energy Subsidiary):

Worked on a Kotlin-based platform responsible for ingesting and normalising data from multiple partners, enabling both internal systems and customer-facing apps to access consistent, reliable data.

Key Contributions:

• Collaborated with the Sales team to implement new opportunities and workflows within Salesforce
• Facilitated multi-team training sessions using immersive VR tools (Talespin) to improve onboarding and engagement
• Researched, trialled, and implemented NPS tools based on product requirements to improve customer feedback loops

Digital Delivery Team:

Responsible for designing and implementing integrations across a range of internal and external systems. Working closely with Architects and Product Owners, I translated business requirements into scalable, serverless solutions on AWS.

Key Achievements:

• RESTful API Development: Delivered APIs using the Serverless Framework and AWS services (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB) to power account management, payments, meter reads, and usage data used by web, mobile, and IVR platforms

• End-to-End Integration: Led the orchestration of end-to-end customer journeys by integrating with the Electricity/Gas Registry, broadband provisioning APIs, and UiPath RPA bots to automate manual workflows

• Performance Optimization: Rebuilt the consumption API by migrating from SAP OData to PostgreSQL (RDS), achieving over a 90% reduction in response time from 6 seconds to under 600ms in production

Impac was working on reinventing their main health and safety product by creating a new .NET Core and Angular application called Shield to provide a competitive and modern solution to meet current market requirements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contributed to developing Shield, a new .NET Core and Angular health and safety product
• Worked with business users in New Zealand to gather requirements and inform development priorities
• Trained offshore developers on the Shield application to enable continued development and knowledge transfer

Developed a modern online learning platform that enhances the learner experience and provides meaningful analytics and insights to increase engagement.

Key Responsibilities:

• Worked on the core Angular and Express applications that facilitate the consumption, creation, and management of online learning content

• Built features to enhance the learner experience and improve course delivery for educational institutions

• Collected analytics on new features to track user engagement, helping make informed decisions about where to make improvements on the product based on usage patterns

• Contributed to the full stack development of the platform, working across frontend and backend technologies

Completed an internship which led to full-time employment in Business Information Services.

Experience Gained:

• Learned about IT operations within a large organization
• Gained practical experience in enterprise software development
• Worked with SharePoint and JavaScript to deliver business solutions
• Transitioned from intern to full-time software developer