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Xero is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to join its Search team, which maintains and evolves one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. This role offers genuine scale and technical depth: you will help keep hundreds of millions of searchable documents running at 99.9% uptime while contributing to a significant multi-year platform rebuild that will shape Xero's next generation of growth.
You will take real ownership across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, including contributing code, raising and reviewing pull requests, and leading projects. The Search team is small and tight-knit, spread across Melbourne, New South Wales, and New Zealand, and works closely with a dedicated Product Manager, the ingestion layer team, and the Catalyst Platform team.
Current priorities include a large-scale search platform rebuild using a cluster processing hundreds of millions of documents at global scale, maintaining and evolving the cluster for high uptime, collaborating on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform, and developing future capabilities in data and AI-adjacent search.
You bring strong search engineering experience and understand what it takes to build, maintain, and scale search systems in production. You have solid software engineering fundamentals and are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist work. Quality is paramount to you—you hold a high bar for code you write and review. You collaborate naturally across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams in a distributed environment. Experience with data or AI tooling is a bonus but not required.
The role offers flexibility in where you work day-to-day, with the team coming together in Melbourne approximately every six months for in-person alignment and collaboration. Xero also offers boost days for optional office collaboration.
