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Salary: USD 287,000 - 320,000 / annual
Xero is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical strategy and architecture for its Reporting & Insights platform. This is a senior technical leadership role where you'll set multi-year direction for how millions of small businesses and their advisors use financial reports and insights to make decisions.
You'll own three major technical challenges: (1) Define a 3-year target architecture across Reporting and Xero Analytics, modernizing systems that have evolved over many years while designing for high throughput, low latency, and resilience to serve Xero's largest customers; (2) Lead the evolution of data foundations behind ~150 reports across teams and organizational boundaries, maintaining correctness and trust (accountants file tax returns from these numbers) while building for the future; (3) Make reporting and insights AI-native by defining foundations for how agents safely query financial data, keep answers grounded and explainable, and prove correctness at scale.
In your first six months, you'll own the Reporting & Insights architecture and set direction that engineering, Product, and leadership align behind. By twelve months, you'll have delivered a multi-year technical strategy, new foundations for major report families, performance improvements that scale to the largest customers, shared foundations for AI-native reporting in production, and grown the Lead and Senior Engineers around you.
You'll report to the GM of Engineering and partner with engineering managers, Product leads, and Principal Engineers across Xero's accounting core and data platform teams. You stay hands-on on reference implementations, foundational frameworks, and the hardest architecture problems.
Xero operates with a hybrid model blending remote flexibility with office collaboration, including designated boost days. The role is open to hybrid candidates in Vancouver, BC or San Mateo, CA, candidates across Canada interested in relocating to Vancouver, and remote candidates in Seattle, WA.
REQUIREMENTS
Must-have:
- 2–3 years of experience setting technical strategy for a domain or portfolio and aligning multiple teams behind it
- Led the evolution of a large, high-traffic, correctness-critical system across organizational boundaries
- Deep expertise in high-throughput, low-latency, resilient distributed systems and data-heavy architecture, with hands-on contributions where it matters
- Ability to connect external shifts (especially AI) to product and architecture strategy; understanding of where LLMs and agents belong in a system
- Track record growing leaders: mentored Lead and Senior Engineers into bigger roles; ability to communicate complex direction clearly in writing
Nice-to-have:
- Financial, reporting, or analytics domain experience
- LLM or agent-based features shipped in production
- .NET and AWS experience
- Presence in wider tech community (talks, writing, open source)
