Lead Engineer

Department: Xero Engineering

Location: AU: Melbourne: (260 Burwood Rd), AU: Sydney (45 Clarence St)

Employment Type: FullTime

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 Do

• Drive 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.

What You’ll Bring

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.

Where & How You'll Work

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?

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.