SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Xero is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to lead Product Platform Engineering, the technical backbone powering all product engineering across the organization. Reporting to the Senior Vice President of Engineering for Product Platforms, you will shape long-term technical direction and architecture at the highest level, guiding large-scale initiatives and navigating industry paradigm shifts including AI-native engineering at scale.
The Product Platforms team establishes unified platform standards, clear architectural pathways, and developer autonomy while maintaining strong guardrails. Initial focus areas include modernizing Xero's core accounting architecture by decoupling the tightly bound monolith, extracting product-specific business logic, and establishing a unified, resilient API and middleware surface layer. You will drive architectural strategy starting with the invoicing workflow vertical slice, then expanding across Bank Feeds, Product Packaging & Subscriptions, and core platform data flows.
Key responsibilities include taking a mission-critical foundation and systematically reshaping it for higher throughput, extreme reliability, and long-term scalability without risking customer data integrity. You will establish technical foundations, principles, and safety guardrails required to support safe agentic development, autonomous operations, and AI-native engineering workflows. You will define company-wide engineering practices, architectural standards, and high-speed feedback loops that maximize developer autonomy while maintaining systemic guardrails.
You bring proven track record operating at the highest levels of technical authority across large engineering organizations (1,000+ engineers), with deep experience evolving massive business-critical legacy architectures into modern, decoupled product platforms with unified API layers (GraphQL/REST) and distributed microservices. You excel at aligning senior stakeholders, C-suite executives, and cross-functional VP leadership around bold architectural bets using clear technical vision, strategic diplomacy, and inspirational storytelling. You have demonstrated passion for building first-class APIs, shared libraries, and platform capabilities that abstract deep domain complexity while upholding strict data integrity standards, and vision in preparing platform architecture for AI-native engineering, automated software delivery, and advanced reliability paradigms at global scale.
The role offers a flexible hybrid working model with regular boost days for strategic alignment and collaboration, with specific arrangements negotiable based on region.
