General Manager, Data Science

The role

You will own the data science, analytics, ML, and AI strategy and execution across Accounting & Bookkeeping, Small Business, and AI products. You will lead and scale a team of data scientists, analytics engineers, ML engineers, and managers from approximately 12 to 30 people.

What you will do

• Translate company-level objectives into strategic sub-objectives across analytics, ML, AI products, and experimentation.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of data scientists, analytics engineers, ML engineers, and managers.
• Design team structures and operating models for multiple locations and time zones.
• Drive how AI changes how data science operates and ships value.
• Advise C-suite and SLT on data utilization, retention strategy, new data domains, and AI investment decisions.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing, Commercial, Legal, Privacy and Risk on strategy, prioritisation and governance.
• Own AI governance, model risk, data quality, privacy posture, and experimentation integrity.
• Drive behavioral, technical, and cultural standards across the vertical.
• Improve global hiring practices, build talent maps, and coach senior leaders and individual contributors.
• Identify delivery and strategic risks and design organizational processes.

Required qualifications

• Operated, shipped, and led at scale within a fast-paced technology environment.
• Ability to act as a proactive self-starter and executive partner.
• Ability to manage ambiguity and bring structure to complex cross-functional challenges.
• Ability to sustain throughput across multi-timezone teams.
• Skilled in leading managers and coaching leaders into senior roles.
• Experienced in navigating teams through significant scale-ups and operating model transformations.
• Practical experience leveraging frontier-model platforms to build agentic workflows, chatbots, and AI-powered products.
• Substantial experience leading data science, ML, or analytics functions and managing other people leaders.
• Extensive experience building and running enterprise-scale data science functions, AI/ML productionisation, AI governance, model risk frameworks, and experimentation integrity.
• Deep technical fluency across applied ML, analytics engineering, instrumentation, eventing, and schema governance.
• Technical bachelor's or master's degree.
• Public thought leadership or open-source contributions in data or AI.

Nice to have

• PhDs welcome for applied, high-impact organizational challenges
• Prior exposure to SaaS or small business segments

About the company

Xero aims to supercharge small businesses by making them more efficient and connecting them with big business technology. They work to build a stronger economy by empowering a community behind small businesses.