At Xero, our purpose is to make running a business beautiful. By delivering smart, efficient tools to millions of small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers worldwide, we empower communities and help build a stronger global economy.
As a Lead Engineer, you will model the standard for engineering excellence at Xero. You will balance hands-on technical execution with strategic engineering leadership—guiding technical design, mentoring a high-performing team, and delivering multi-quarter product and platform goals.
This is a unique opportunity to lead a team through a significant AI transformation. You will lead the charge in harnessing agentic AI to optimize software development workflows while embedding intelligent, agentic features directly into our customer-facing products.
What You’ll DoDrive AI & Modernization Initiatives: Lead technical design and implementation, balancing legacy code modernization (C# / .NET, React) with cutting-edge agentic AI integration across internal workflows and customer features.
Hands-on Technical Leadership: Guide system architecture, simplify complex technical designs, and write clean, scalable, maintainable code.
Elevate Engineering Excellence: Identify technical blockers, champion modern quality and testing strategies, optimize CI/CD deployment pipelines, and maintain system resilience.
Incident Management & Reliability: Recognise failure patterns, participate in the team on-call roster, lead incident responses, and facilitate post-mortems.
Mentor & Lift Team Capability: Actively coach and mentor engineers, establishing a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing culture focused on continuous learning.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Strategy: Build strong cross-functional relationships, break down operational silos, and influence technical roadmaps to achieve wider organizational goals.
We value problem-solving ability, adaptable thinking, and hands-on capability over rigid formal checklists.
Technical Expertise: Strong background in C# and .NET environments is preferred (or expertise in similar OO languages like Java with a language-agnostic mindset and quick adaptability).
Distributed Architecture & Scale: Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable distributed systems and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS).
AI Enthusiast / Forward-Thinker: Genuine interest or hands-on experience in leveraging AI tools, LLMs, or agentic AI systems to transform engineering workflows and user experiences.
Diverse Environmental Exposure: Experience navigating complex codebases, legacy modernization, or fast-paced technical environments (e.g., consulting, fintech, banking, SaaS, or regulated sectors).
Pragmatic Leadership: A track record of coaching engineers, managing technical trade-offs, and resolving complex technical challenges with clear communication.
Note: A formal Computer Science degree is not mandatory—we prioritize real-world experience, skills, and impact.
We offer a flexible hybrid working model designed to balance autonomy, focus, and connection. You can split your time between working remotely from home and collaborating in-person with your team at our vibrant offices in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.
Why Join Xero?At Xero, we live by our core values:
We make it beautiful: Create experiences that customers love.
We make it happen: Move fast on the right things and value progress over perfection.
We make it human: Care personally, challenge respectfully, and prioritize wellbeing.
We make it together: Collaborate transparently to build trust and achieve shared goals.
Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you bring to our team.
Skills Required
- Strong background in C# and .NET environments
- Expertise in object-oriented languages such as Java and quick language adaptability
- Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable distributed systems and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS)
- Genuine interest in or hands-on experience with AI tools, LLMs, or agentic AI systems
- Experience navigating and modernizing complex or legacy codebases
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, system resilience, incident management, and post-mortems
- Proven experience mentoring and coaching engineers and building inclusive, high-performing teams
- Experience with React frontend development
What We Do
Xero is small business accounting software that provides a platform on which businesses can build a fully integrated solution. It’s designed to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. Xero minimises tedious admin by automating routine tasks, delivers valuable insights when needed, and brings together business data, trusted advisors, and powerful apps in one intuitive platform. By alleviating pain points, Xero empowers small business owners to supercharge their business, simplifying the complex and freeing up time from manual admin so they can focus on what really matters to build the business they’ve always envisaged.
Why Work With Us
Xero is a human-centric organization where you’ll have a tangible impact on the success of small businesses and their communities, globally. Our team of energised, forward-thinkers work to make life better for our customers and each other every day. We’re also always committed to supporting you with a flexible environment.
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Xero Teams
Xero Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
Join us from home or at one of our beautiful workspaces. Xero has offices in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Singapore, and South Africa.
