(14/9/2025) 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.

How you’ll make an impact

Own and deliver org/company-wide multi-year, multi-team goals with technical expertise of in-depth understanding of specific technologies and engineering principles relevant (e.g., software, hardware, systems).

Design and evaluate system architectures, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance utilising high-level programming skills in relevant languages, with a focus on best practices and design patterns.

This specific position will unlock and enable Platform Enablement teams to scale for 10x growth while uplifting tech stack through transition states that will drive business value.

At Xero, a Principal Engineer plays a crucial role in shaping and steering the architecture and engineering direction, fostering a sense of community, and developing the capabilities of engineering teams:

- Influencing the technical strategy of a group, often partnering closely with Heads of Engineering and/or senior product and engineering leadership to ensure the health of product development as a whole and influences the overall direction of product development.
- Collaboration with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to align technical solutions with business needs. Principal Engineer helps break down silos within and across functions and influences others to reach the best outcome for Xero. They build deep cross-functional relationships, facilitate the right conversations, and settle disagreements by managing different viewpoints.
- Principal Engineer lifts team performance through goal clarity, feedback, removal of barriers, coaching and establishing a psychologically safe inclusive team culture. They model a standard of excellence that supports a culture of high performance on their team. They drive engineering-wide processes and define the bar for quality and best practices. They devote time to spreading knowledge widely via talks, blog posts or written documentation.
- Proven experience in software engineering with a focus on system architecture and design.
- Champion a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas and technologies through prototypes and proof-of-concept projects.

What you’ll do

- We make it beautiful: Support, develop and deliver by actively measuring, monitoring, and continuously improving the performance and reliability of applications you are responsible for.
- We make it happen: Delivery Management / Planning and Execution - Expertise in planning, executing, and monitoring projects, often using Agile or other methodologies to ensure timely delivery.
- We make it human - Proactive in exploring new technologies and methodologies to improve processes and product offerings. Collaborate and coach your team to align to Xero Engineering Standards eg: compliance and security requirements in the Path to Production Standard, front-end development requirements in the Web Application Standard.
- We make it together: Strong ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and advocate for the engineering team's needs. This includes Cross-Functional Collaboration in working with product management, design, and other departments to ensure cohesive project alignment.

About you

- Demonstrate knowledge, skills and expertise leading data platform engineering teams, driving project goals, and maintaining high standards of quality with a deep understanding of the relevant technologies (AWS, GCP), CDC patterns, tools, and processes in their domain (e.g., software development, systems engineering).
- Share expertise and experience to connect and support the growth of a culture of continuous empathy towards our customers among your team with the ability to make architectural decisions and understand complex systems to guide teams effectively.
- Attributes and motivations to grow the talent in the team by identifying skill gaps and ensuring there is a clear strategy to close those gaps (which might include upskilling, reassigning or hiring team members).

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, 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.

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. Our goal is to make sure you feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.

At Xero we embrace diversity and inclusion and value a #challenge mindset. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience. If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.

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