Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

About the role 

We are looking for Principal Engineers with a passion for building easily scalable and maintainable cloud based products to work within our Payroll and Practice product domains.

You’ll provide a shining light of engineering excellence and leadership that other engineers aspire to and want to emulate. The engineers in the teams around you will grow in capability and confidence by working with you.

The engineering team will have the ability to design and build solutions that follow our architectural and engineering guidelines and meet the goals of our roadmaps. Ultimately, you’ll leave the codebase AND the coders better than you found them!

We're hiring several Principal Engineers across the product areas below. We're looking for people to help us deliver on our greatest ambitions, whilst driving the highest standards of engineering excellence.

Xero Payroll

The Payroll team's purpose is to make it easier for small business owners to pay and manage their people. We take the complexity out of Payroll for employers to save them time and ensure that their employees are paid correctly. 

As a Technical Lead in Payroll, you will help define and deliver our technical strategy within your team and ensure that we are creating a customer focused experience that people can trust.

Xero Practice

This role is part of the Practice portfolio. We deliver software solutions to help accountants and bookkeepers to do beautiful work. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a strategic contributor helping re-engineer our core foundational technology. Our goal is to deliver seamless user experiences, strong public APIs, data consistency, and strong infrastructure engineering across all of the tools our customers and partners use.

If you are passionate about one or more of the problems above, this might be the opportunity you are looking for.

As a Principal Engineer you’ll lead software engineering excellence by:

• Technical coaching and mentoring our engineers to reach their full potential
• Assist the teams to contribute to and translate architecture into a technical vision and roadmap across the domain and then assist in implementing that vision over time
• Collaborate with Architects and various organisational platforms, to deliver on best engineering practices
• Work with our teams to create solutions while meeting requirements and balancing the goals and constraints of current solution design with desired end state with the responsibility for ensuring the right tool/framework/technique is used for the right job
• Championing and driving engineering principles and practices including assisting in the implementation of new standards, technologies or methodologies
• Provide guidance on non-functional design elements in solutions including security, scalability and performance, monitoring and alerting, analytics, documentation and quality
• Guide and influence technical related decisions across the teams

What you'll bring with you

• Track record of developing software that is secure, performant and scalable
• A passion for coaching and mentoring developers
• Ability to influence and lead engineers to a great outcome
• Experience working on cloud infrastructure platforms
• Capable of architecting, designing and implementing customer focused software solutions

Flexible Working

Xero is continuing to grow and so are the opportunities to join us!

You can choose to perform this role:

In one of our #beautiful offices (Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane)

Flexibly, through a hybrid of in office and remote working styles

Permanently Remote

As a permanent remote worker at Xero we want to ensure you are getting the same #beautiful employee experience as our in-office Xero’s. Permanent remote Xero’s will benefit from a virtual ergonomic work assessment and funding to assist with the improvement of your at home work setup. Xero will also fund up to 4 trips a year to your most relevant region Xero office. You are part of our #team and we want to see you thrive!

Why Xero?

At Xero we support many types of flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. We offer a great remuneration package including shares plus a range of leave options to suit your well-being. Our work environment encourages continuous improvement and career development and you’ll get to work with the latest technology.

Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate successfully. We are a member of Pride in Diversity, in recognition of our inclusive workplace. So, from the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.