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Xero is reimagining accounting software and making a critical multi-year investment in payments. As Principal Engineer for Payments Products & Platform, you will shape technical strategy across multiple engineering teams and drive domain-level influence over the next two to three years.
You will lead two connected portfolios: Payments Products & Experiences (checkout, payment methods, flexible payments, AI payment agents) and Payments Platform (provider integrations, bill payments, product-agnostic API). Together, these teams move billions of dollars across 150,000+ daily transactions, scaling to double as Xero expands into the UK and US.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting long-term technical direction and strategy across multiple teams
- Partnering with senior stakeholders to translate complex requirements into scalable, resilient systems
- Staying hands-on with technical detail while setting the example for a portfolio of 40-50 engineers
- Mentoring Staff and Senior engineers, shaping cross-team initiatives, and setting engineering standards across Xero
- Driving architecture decisions for microservices across web, API, and data layers
- Balancing reliability, performance, and cost in large-scale distributed systems
- Leading work on legacy system modernization (extend, migrate, or rebuild decisions)
- Modeling best practices for AI tooling adoption to automate tasks and improve engineering outcomes
- Contributing to growth initiatives, including A/B testing and product usage analysis
The tech stack includes C#, Java, Go, C++ running on AWS with SQL and NoSQL data stores. Current focus areas: reviewing existing payments systems, Growth experiments, and AI-powered payment chasing. Future focus: agentic payment workflows, payments inside AI assistants, recurring payments, and global payment rails.
You'll work hybrid from Sydney or Melbourne offices, collaborating across Australia and US time zones with colleagues globally.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep experience designing and running large-scale distributed systems in production, balancing reliability, performance, and cost
- Payments or fintech experience strongly preferred
- API-first thinking and fluency across web, API, and data layers
- Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (C#, Java, Go, C++)
- Strong SQL and NoSQL database knowledge
- Cloud-native platform experience, ideally AWS
- Hands-on capability with legacy systems; ability to make clear, practical decisions on extend/migrate/build strategies
- Proven ability to pair, spike, and write code
- Essential: strong interest in utilizing AI tooling to automate tasks and improve engineering outcomes
- Deep curiosity for growth hacking and proven ability to design and analyze A/B tests
- Mentoring and cross-team leadership experience
- Passion for setting engineering standards and lifting engineering excellence across organizations
