The role / impact
This is a role for a search specialist who wants to work at genuine scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere; part of an entire vertical stack delivered to customers. The work is both meaningful and technically stretching: keeping hundreds of millions of searchable documents at global scale running at 99.9% uptime, while contributing to a significant platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero's growth.
Beyond the day-to-day, this role is about real ownership. You will contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review pull requests, and lead projects. If you are someone who cares about quality and gets energised by hard problems at scale, this is a place where your work will genuinely matter.
The team & how they connect
The Search team is a small, tight-knit group spread across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand. You will partner closely with a team who are building the ingestion layer for our platform, a dedicated Product Manager, and the Catalyst Platform team who coordinate changes and releases across services. The team brings a high-quality mindset to everything they do, and solves challenging technical problems together.
The team is currently working on
A large-scale search platform rebuild - a multi-year project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, using a search cluster that processes that processes hundreds of millions of documents at global scale
Maintaining and evolving the cluster to keep systems running at 99.9% uptime
Collaborating with the ODL team on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform
Future capability development in data and AI-adjacent search, as the platform continues to evolve
Where and how you can work
This role can be based in Australia or NZ. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day. The team comes together in Melbourne approximately every six months - a chance to connect, align, and spend time in person with colleagues across regions. Xero also offers boost days, giving you the option to work from the office and collaborate with the broader Xero community when it suits you.
Here are some of the things we are looking for
You bring strong search engineering experience and know what it takes to build, maintain and scale search systems in a production environment
Solid software engineering and development fundamentals are part of your toolkit, and you are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work
Quality comes first for you - you hold a high bar for the code you write and review, and care about doing things properly
Working collaboratively with others comes naturally to you, whether that is with engineering, product or infrastructure teams across a distributed environment
Bonus points if you have exposure to data or AI tooling, though this is not a requirement to be considered
Skills Required
- Strong search engineering experience building, maintaining, and scaling production search systems
- Solid software engineering and development fundamentals
- Ability to contribute to search-specific and generalist engineering work
- High standards for code quality, code review, and engineering practices
- Ability to collaborate effectively with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams
- Experience with data or AI tooling
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
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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.
