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Join Xero's Search team as a Search Engineer and help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. You'll work on infrastructure that powers Xero for 200,000+ daily active users, handling 50+ million searchable documents and 400TB of data at 99.9% uptime.
In this role, you'll grow your search engineering skills while contributing to meaningful projects. You'll work on both search-specific and generalist engineering tasks, collaborate with experienced engineers through code reviews, and gradually take on larger responsibilities as you develop expertise.
You'll be part of a small, tight-knit distributed team across Melbourne, New South Wales, and New Zealand, now part of Xero's Catalyst platform division. The team works collaboratively with a Product Manager, a Principal Architect, and the broader Catalyst Platform team. This is a great environment to learn search engineering at scale whilst working alongside senior engineers and technical leaders.
The team is currently working on:
- Horizon 2 platform rebuild: Contributing to a four-year search platform modernisation project
- Cluster maintenance and evolution: Helping maintain search infrastructure at 99.9% uptime across massive scale
- Operational Data Layer (ODL) integration: Working on ingestion pipeline integration with the new platform
- Exploring new partnerships: Collaborating on integrations with Mobile, Files, and AI-adjacent search capabilities
You can work remotely within Australia or New Zealand or hybrid from one of Xero's offices. The team gathers in Melbourne approximately every six months for in-person collaboration, and there are optional "boost days" for office work when you'd like to connect with colleagues face-to-face.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Search engineering experience: You've built or maintained search systems and are keen to deepen your expertise in this domain
- Solid software engineering fundamentals: You understand core software engineering principles and write clean, maintainable code
- Growth mindset: You're eager to learn from experienced engineers and tackle increasingly complex problems
- Collaboration skills: You work well with others across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams in a distributed environment
- Initiative and ownership: You take on tasks with enthusiasm and aren't afraid to ask questions when you need support
