At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology, and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small businesses we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
How You’ll Make an ImpactAs a Principal Engineer, you will work in collaboration across multiple teams within our product group to help create and deliver world-class software to our customers, faster.
You will help define the standard for engineering excellence at Xero, evolving our technical architecture in alignment with product strategy, and leading initiatives that grow the technical capabilities of our engineers. Partnering closely with engineering leadership (including Stephen Dewar), you will influence group-level technical strategy, break down organizational silos, and drive data-driven architectural decisions that release value early to solve complex customer problems at scale.
What You’ll DoEngineering Excellence & Architecture: Guide engineering practices across multiple teams, advocate for new technologies and tooling, and establish portfolio-wide architectural direction.
Scalable Systems & Infrastructure: Contribute to the design of highly scalable, reliable, and performant cloud-native applications. Guide teams in balancing automation, performance, operational health, and deployment pipelines.
Quality & Reliability: Promote Xero-wide quality standards, guide teams in defining and implementing SLOs, and ensure security and data guidelines are embedded across systems.
Systemic Issue Prevention: Focus on proactive prevention of production issues through robust tooling and engineering best practices. Participate in the team on-call rotation and help refocus projects when needed.
Technical Debt & DevOps Culture: Shape thinking around DevOps culture, establish frameworks to quantify the cost of technical debt, and drive strategic pay-down of tech debt.
Coaching & Talent Growth: Mentor and coach engineers across all levels (including Lead Engineers), creating a psychologically safe, inclusive, and high-performing environment.
Recruitment & Community: Participate in interviewing, actively engage with the external tech community, and act as an ambassador for Xero’s engineering brand.
Proven Technical Leadership: Extensive experience leading large, complex technical initiatives to delivery on cloud-native platforms, with a track record of scaling for performance and reliability.
Executive Communication: Outstanding ability to communicate complex technical concepts with nuance and clarity to technical teams and senior executive leaders alike.
Strategic Architectural Vision: Demonstrated capability in contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and aligning engineering delivery with broader business strategy.
Pragmatic Problem Solving: Skilled in deconstructing complex challenges into clear, actionable outcomes and navigating technical trade-offs.
Technical Debt Management: Proven ability to implement frameworks to quantify technical debt and prioritize remediation alongside feature delivery.
Mentorship & Culture: A strong commitment to coaching engineers, driving delivery practices, and fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe, and collaborative engineering culture.
At Xero, we value our culture and live our values every day:
We Make it Beautiful: We challenge ourselves to dream big, innovate, and inspire.
We Make it Happen: We value progress over perfection, driving clarity, decisiveness, and accountability.
We Make it Human: We care personally and challenge respectfully in an empathetic and inclusive environment.
We Make it Together: We build trust through transparency, diverse perspectives, and strong relationships.
Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.
Skills Required
- Extensive experience leading large, complex technical initiatives on cloud-native platforms
- Proven ability to design scalable, reliable, and performant systems
- Experience defining and implementing SLOs and production quality/reliability standards
- Strong communication skills for technical and executive audiences
- Experience establishing architectural vision and aligning technical roadmaps with business strategy
- Demonstrated ability to quantify and drive remediation of technical debt
- Track record of mentoring and coaching engineers across levels and fostering inclusive culture
- Willingness to participate in team on-call rotation
Xero Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — The U.S. package lists 21 days of annual leave, 10 days of wellbeing leave, five “Xtra” days, three year‑end company holidays, and a paid volunteer day. Global materials also point to 20+ days of annual leave and additional wellbeing time across regions, indicating broad coverage beyond the U.S.
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Parental & Family Support — Primary caregivers can receive up to 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with six weeks of paid partner leave. Family‑forming benefits (e.g., Carrot) and counseling/coaching access for employees and immediate family further strengthen support.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical (Cigna and Kaiser options), dental (Cigna PPO), and vision (VSP) are complemented by life, AD&D, and short/long‑term disability coverage. Modern Health mental‑health support and a funded ThrivePass wellbeing account add depth to the health offering.
Xero Insights
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.
