  Near-term applications of quantum information processors will rely on
optimized circuit implementations to minimize gate depth and therefore mitigate
the impact of gate errors in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers.
More expressive gate sets can significantly reduce the gate depth of generic
circuits. Similarly, structured algorithms can benefit from a gate set that
more directly matches the symmetries of the problem. The XY interaction
generates a family of gates that provides expressiveness well tailored to
quantum chemistry as well as to combinatorial optimization problems, while also
offering reductions in circuit depth for more generic circuits. Here we
implement the full family of XY entangling gates in a transmon-based
superconducting qubit architecture. We use a composite pulse scheme that
requires calibration of only a single gate pulse and maintains constant gate
time for all members of the family. This allows us to maintain a high fidelity
implementation of the gate across all entangling angles. The average fidelity
of gates sampled from this family ranges from $95.67 \pm 0.60\%$ to $99.01 \pm
0.15\%$, with a median fidelity of $97.35 \pm 0.17\%$, which approaches the
coherence-limited gate fidelity of the qubit pair. We furthermore demonstrate
the utility of XY in a quantum approximation optimization algorithm in enabling
circuit depth reductions as compared to the CZ only case.
