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Xero is reimagining accounting software and now investing heavily in payments—how small businesses get paid and how money moves. You'll join as Principal Engineer for either the Payments Products & Experiences portfolio (checkout, payment methods, flexible payments, AI payment agents) or the Payments Platform portfolio (provider integrations, bill payments, product-agnostic API). These teams move billions of dollars across 150,000+ daily transactions, scaling to double as Xero expands into UK and US markets.
You'll shape technical strategy across a portfolio of 40–50 engineers, partnering with senior stakeholders to translate complex requirements into scalable, resilient systems. You'll stay hands-on—pairing, spiking, and reviewing code—while setting the example for engineering excellence. You'll also join Xero's global Principal Engineer community, driving architecture standards and best practices across the company.
The tech stack spans microservices (C#, Java, Go, C++) on AWS with SQL and NoSQL stores. Current work includes reviewing existing payments systems (extend/migrate/rebuild decisions), Growth experiments, and AI-powered payment chasing. Future focus: agentic payment workflows, payments inside AI assistants, recurring payments, and global replatforming for new markets.
You'll be based in Sydney or Melbourne, working hybrid with Boost days for in-person collaboration. You'll work across Australian and US time zones as payment flows run 24/7.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep experience designing and running large-scale distributed systems in production, balancing reliability, performance, and cost; payments or fintech experience is a strong plus.
- API-first thinking; fluency across web, API, and data layers with at least one modern backend language (C#, Java, Go, C++), SQL, NoSQL stores, and cloud-native platforms (ideally AWS).
- Comfort with legacy-heavy systems; ability to make clear, practical decisions on extend/migrate/build while staying hands-on through pairing, spikes, and code review.
- Strong interest in AI tooling; ability to model and demonstrate how to use these technologies to automate tasks and improve engineering outcomes.
- Deep curiosity for growth hacking and proven ability to design and analyze A/B tests that drive product usage.
- Mentoring capability for Staff and Senior engineers; ability to shape cross-team initiatives and set standards that lift engineering across Xero.
