Principal Engineer

Our Purpose

At Xero, we're here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we're not only making life better for small business, we'll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

Shape the future of Global Tax As our next Principal Engineer , you'll empower two dynamic teams to tackle complex challenges for customers worldwide. Drive solutions with a sharp focus on scalability, top-tier quality, and smart reusability.

Our teams collaborate closely with regional tax teams, crafting targeted solutions while building a robust, shared platform. Are you a tech leader with exceptional software design skills? Can you clearly communicate intricate technical concepts, inspiring both engineers and senior leaders to embrace innovative solutions?

If you're ready to make a significant impact on a global scale, fuelling innovation and building the core of our tax solutions, explore this Principal Engineer opportunity.

• Must have hands-on experience building and maintaining robust APIs. Must demonstrate a strong command of API design principles, security measures, and performance optimisation
• Proven experience in tech leading large, complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals.
• Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Strong communicator—able to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at the executive level.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development.
• Experience contributing to technical vision and advocating for engineering best practices across a portfolio.
• Skilled in developing and implementing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and determine when to address it.
• Ability to advocate for and design automated processes and tooling that ensure product delivery is correct, secure, and safe to deploy.
• Proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.
• Strong problem-solving skills, simplifying complex technical challenges into clear, actionable outcomes for teams.
• A commitment to fostering a psychologically safe, inclusive environment that supports collaboration and innovation.

• 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 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

Why Xero?

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you'd like (plus statutory holidays), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family. Health insurance, life insurance, and income protection.

We offer wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value.

You'll do the best work of your life at Xero