Eric Hislop

Senior Engineer in Xero’s Dispatch pod, focused on the reliability and scale of Xero Mail and Xero SMS across AU, US, UK, and NZ. Over the last year I moved from onboarding into broader ownership of customer impacting platform work: tooling, reliability, and architecture for how Xero communicates with customers and their clients.

I led the build out of a unified Comms Admin experience for customer support teams, giving them a single place to investigate and act on email and SMS issues. That work tightened the loop between engineering and customer experience and made investigations faster and more consistent. I also improved SMS resilience, including smarter retry behaviour, as send volume grew meaningfully across regions.

Alongside shipping features, I invested in how the team builds: a full local development setup for Xero Mail, written architecture decisions, and planning for a migration of our email rate limiting to a central service so sending stays safe and predictable at scale. I work closely with security and platform partners when incidents or abuse patterns show up. I regularly share progress through demos and internal documentation so the wider engineering organisation understands what the comms stack does and how to work with it. The role mixes hands on engineering with growing technical leadership and a strong customer lens.

Highlights

• Unified Comms Admin for support: clearer workflows and strong adoption across internal teams
• Faster turnaround on customer impacting comms issues through better tooling and collaboration
• SMS reliability and delivery hardening as usage scaled across regions
• Sustained strong mail and SMS delivery performance across multiple geographies
• Local development environment for Xero Mail to reduce friction for engineers
• Discovery and phased design for centralised email rate limiting and which systems depend on it
• Cross team collaboration on incidents, abuse, and platform stability
• Engineering demos, documentation, and enablement for broader audiences

JavaScript TypeScript Node.js C# AWS Kubernetes Terraform Git Microservices Email delivery SMS

Stepped into a 6-month secondment as Team Lead during a pivotal organisational shift at Xero: the introduction of a change approval process for production releases. 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.

Leadership Mentoring Stakeholder Management Delivery Change Management Collaboration

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 cloud hosted developer portal product (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 hosted 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

JavaScript Node.js C# AWS Kubernetes Backstage Terraform SQL Git Swagger Jira Confluence

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 tools to measure customer satisfaction and feedback, based on product requirements

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 Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Key Achievements:

• Web APIs: Delivered APIs using the Serverless Framework and AWS (compute functions, API front doors, NoSQL data stores) to power account management, payments, meter reads, and usage data used by web, mobile, and phone self service channels

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

• Performance: Rebuilt the consumption API by migrating from SAP OData to PostgreSQL on a managed relational database service, achieving over a 90% reduction in response time from 6 seconds to under 600ms in production

JavaScript Node.js AWS Serverless Framework Lambda API Gateway DynamoDB SQS RDS PostgreSQL UiPath Kotlin Salesforce

Impac was working on reinventing their main health and safety product by creating a new application called Shield, built with Microsoft’s .NET stack and Angular, to provide a competitive and modern solution to meet current market requirements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contributed to developing Shield, a new health and safety product on .NET and Angular
• 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

C# .NET Core Angular JavaScript

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

JavaScript Node.js Angular Express.js

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

JavaScript SharePoint