Rhommel Lamas

Rhommel Lamas

Head of Engineering at Xero

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Rhommel has an international career of almost two decades in roles that include but are not limited to DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and engineering leadership in startups and large-scale enterprises.

He is currently Head of Engineering at Xero, where he is responsible for site reliability, incident and problem management, and the observability strategy, SLOs, and tooling that drive operational excellence.

Previously, he was Sr. Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, leading the Observability team and APAC Edge SRE, and before that Head of Site Reliability Engineering at Apptio, leading a globally distributed organisation of more than 40 engineers.

Skills

Analysis
Leadership
Coaching
Communication

Experience

Head of engineering, SRE, incident and problem management

Xero · Sydney, Australia

Sep 2026 – Present (1 month)

Scope expanded from SRE to include incident and problem management.

Head of engineering, SRE

Xero · Sydney, Australia

May 2026 – Sep 2026 (4 months)

Scope expanded from Observability to include SRE. Key accomplishments: - Reassessed criticality tiers across all services running in production - Identified over 20 systemic reliability risks across the platform through service reviews and high-availability drills, and built the remediation strategy to close them

Head of engineering, observability

Xero · Sydney, Australia

Mar 2025 – Apr 2026 (1 year 1 month)

Key accomplishments: - Reduced observability spend by $2M annually by designing ingestion management mechanisms and controls, without degrading engineering teams' ability to troubleshoot or investigate incidents - Drove AI-accelerated delivery of 200+ features end-to-end in 3 months (about 3 shipped per business day) by embedding AI into the default engineering workflow, and modernized incident management processes using AI tooling to cut engineering time-to-market

Sr. engineering manager - observability

Cloudflare · San Francisco, California

Oct 2022 – Mar 2025 (2 years 5 months)

Responsible for Cloudflare's Observability roadmap, Edge SRE in APJC, and Cloudflare China. The Observability team is responsible for the systems that enable Cloudflare to quickly identify, troubleshoot, mitigate, and resolve incidents, such as https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-incident-on-january-24th-2023/. Key accomplishments: - Built the observability platform ingesting petabyte-scale telemetry from 1,000+ global data centers at per-second granularity, enabling 2,000+ services to run deep troubleshooting across a massively distributed environment. Reduced incident detection and mitigation time from hours to single-digit minutes - Enabled engineering teams to self-instrument 2,000+ services with production-grade observability, shifting quality left so engineers could catch defects before they reached production - Architected Cloudflare's health-mediated deployment system and led the team that delivered it to production, scaling to 20% of production services at peak and processing 200,000+ requests per second of real-time SLO calculations to progressively validate releases and proactively halt bad deploys

Engineering manager - SRE / Cloudflare China

Cloudflare · San Francisco, California

Jul 2021 – Jun 2023 (1 year 11 months)

Led Cloudflare's SRE and Observability charter for the China region, growing the team from 6 to 9 engineers, including 2 dedicated to Cloudflare China. Built real-time traffic interruption detection to gain visibility into China network performance, cutting interruptions between the rest of the world and China for enterprise customers by 90% and lifting strategic customer NPS by 35% quarter-over-quarter.

Angel investor

Sydney Angels · Sydney, Australia

Apr 2021 – May 2023 (2 years 1 month)

Angel investor with Sydney Angels, running technical due diligence on Australian startups and growing his personal portfolio from 2 active investments in 2021 to 3 in 2023.

Head of site reliability engineering

Apptio, Inc · Sydney, Australia

Dec 2020 – Jul 2021 (7 months)

Led an organization of 42 engineers, managers, and program managers across the US, EU, India, and Australia, building the compute platform that powers Apptio's cloud infrastructure and overseeing product reliability and datacenter operations across FedRAMP, IRAP, SOC2, ISO27001, and FIPS 140-2 compliance environments.

Sr. manager, site reliability engineering

Apptio, Inc · Sydney, Australia

Mar 2019 – Dec 2019 (9 months)

Leading a geo-distributed team, responsible for the scalability and reliability of Apptio's platform and overseeing alignment with the rest of the Products and Engineering organization. Key accomplishments: - Cut global cloud spend by over 70% by adopting reserved instance commitments and building custom Kubernetes operators to optimize storage. These savings funded the full migration off Apptio's global datacenters to AWS - Architected and led execution of the strategy to exit 5 global datacenters for AWS, migrating Apptio's core Java platform to containers and Kubernetes. Grew cloud adoption 150%, migrated 60% of the fleet, and moved 100% of new customer workloads to AWS - Grew the global SRE team 25% in one year and implemented cascading OKRs that brought clarity to team priorities, reducing attrition and fostering a culture of innovation across the organization

Manager, infrastructure engineering

Apptio, Inc · Sydney, Australia

Feb 2018 – Mar 2019 (1 year 1 month)

Led a group of 12 engineers responsible for productionizing Apptio's Kubernetes platform, migrating all of Apptio's products and services onto it by building APIs and operators that managed fleetwide onboarding, while overseeing technical alignment with the TechOps organization.

Sr. site reliability engineer

eBay · Sydney, Australia

Apr 2016 – Jan 2018 (1 year 9 months)

At eBay, I was a member of the team that develop Gumtree.com.au, the largest classified site in Australia. Set the direction to migrate from a complex monolithic application to microservices and OpenStack In two years we developed and release more than 70 microservices including key components like our search engine in coordination with teams in Amsteram and Denmark.

Sr. site reliability engineer

BigCommerce · Sydney, Australia

Oct 2015 – Apr 2016 (6 months)

The SRE team at Bigcommerce is responsible for the operationalization of the infrastructure that provides service for more than 90,000 customers. Addressing scalability issues with the Logging architecture and its migration to AWS.

Sr. site reliability engineer

Atlassian · Sydney, Australia

Apr 2015 – Sep 2015 (5 months)

Atlassian is one of the fastest growing technology businesses in the world with 35,000 customers (including NASA and the United Nations), with offices in Sydney, San Francisco, Austin & Amsterdam. One of the first SREs at Atlassian, I helped address scalability and observability challenges in their global identity platform running on AWS. Increasing the visibility through the onboarding of Datadog, ELK, and Kibana. I also contributed to the development of an internal Logging platform for their more than 90,000 cloud deployments.