Lead/Staff Backend Engineer, Payments Platform

Posted Yesterday
Be an Early Applicant
2 Locations
Remote or Hybrid
206K-257K Annually
Senior level
Cloud • Fintech • Information Technology • Machine Learning • Software
At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business.
The Role
Lead the design and development of reliable and scalable services for Xero's Payments Platform while mentoring engineers and solving complex fintech problems.
Summary Generated by Built In
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.

The Opportunity: Shape the Future of Money Movement

Xero reimagined accounting software. Now, we’re reimagining the flow of money itself. We’re making a critical, multi-year investment in our new Payments Platform organization, the engine that will power payments across all of Xero’s ecosystem.

As a Lead/Staff Engineer on the Payments Platform, you’ll be at the forefront of building scalable systems that redefine how millions of small businesses move money. This is a rare chance to join at an early stage, make foundational architectural decisions, and have a massive, visible impact on Xero’s future.

What You'll Bring With You

  • 8+ Years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Staff / Technical Lead delivering highly available, distributed backend systems at scale.
  • Deep expertise in system architecture, API design, and building high-throughput, reliable services—understanding how to design under the constraints of both new and existing systems.
  • Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend stack (e.g. C# a bonus, Java, Golang, C++) and experience with cloud-native platforms (AWS a bonus).
  • Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases.
  • Demonstrated leadership in setting technical direction, solving complex problems, and mentoring senior and junior engineers.
  • Experience in payments, fintech, or other highly regulated, compliance-heavy domains (preferred but not required).
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, and operations.
  • Proven ability to break down complex problems into clear, actionable solutions and drive agile execution.
  • Experience auditing codebases to uphold high standards for security, testability, and maintainability, with the ability to set and guide code design decisions.

What You’ll Do

  • Define and build core platform services: Lead the design and development of reliable, scalable, performant, and secure services for Xero’s Payments Platform.
  • Architect the future of payments: Shape the technical foundation for Xero’s money movement capabilities while unlocking new product lines.
  • Stay hands-on: Contribute directly to production code, proof-of-concepts, and technical deep dives.
  • Solve complex problems: Tackle challenging fintech and distributed systems problems with innovative solutions.
  • Drive technical excellence: Set a high bar for reliability, security, and scale through design reviews, mentoring, and best practices.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with Product, Security, Risk, and Operations teams to translate complex business needs into resilient engineering solutions.
  • Mentor and grow engineers: Act as a role model, coach, and technical leader, fostering a culture of inclusion, collaboration, and excellence.
  • Ensure operational excellence: Lead on-call practices, build robust observability, and champion high-performance, reliable systems.
  • Drive innovation: Encourage experimentation and adoption of new technologies, staying ahead of industry trends to strengthen our platform.

Why Join Xero’s Payments Platform?

  • Massive Impact: Shape a global payments platform critical to Xero’s revenue and customer growth.
  • Hard Problems, High Scale: Solve complex fintech challenges: global rails, orchestration, compliance, fraud designs and more.
  • Early Stage, Real Ownership: Define foundational systems that future revenue and product lines will depend on.
  • Culture & Growth: Join a team that values excellence, collaboration, and innovation—while providing the support to do the best work of your career.

Why Xero? 
Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. 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, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.

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.

Top Skills

AWS
C#
C++
Go
Java
NoSQL
SQL

What the Team is Saying

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The Company
HQ: Wellington
4,500 Employees
Year Founded: 2006

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

We believe that by simplifying the complex we're not only making life better for small business, we’re helping to create a stronger, more vibrant economy. When you join this team, you’re impacting local communities, on a global scale. Being a Fast Co. Best Workplace for Innovators is a direct reflection of our creative, curious culture.

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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.

Typical time on-site: Flexible
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HQWellington, NZ
Singapore
Auckland, NZ
Brisbane
Calgary
Denver, CO
Melbourne (HQ)
London, GB
Napier, NZ
New York, NY
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San Mateo, CA
Sydney, NSW
Toronto, Ontario
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