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. Principal Engineer Opportunities at Xero! At Xero, Principal Engineers play a pivotal role in driving technical excellence and innovation across our diverse Product and Technology teams. This is an opportunity to leverage your deep expertise in areas such as building and maintaining robust APIs, leading complex cloud-native projects, and championing engineering best practices that impact a global platform serving millions of small businesses. Across various teams, you'll contribute to technical vision, mentor engineers to elevate their skills, and collaborate on solutions that balance immediate needs with long-term strategic goals. You'll be instrumental in guiding non-functional design aspects like security, scalability, and performance, as well as advocating for automation and quantifiable approaches to managing technical debt. If you're a seasoned technical leader with a strong track record in delivering impactful solutions, fostering engineering growth, and influencing technical direction, explore the range of Principal Engineer opportunities at Xero. Join us in building the future of small business.
What you'll bring to the role:
Hands-on experience building and maintaining robust APIs. Demonstrate a strong command of API design principles, security measures, and performance optimisation
Proven experience in tech leading large, complex projects to delivery, ensuring technical excellence and alignment with strategic goals.
Extensive technical leadership experience on cloud-native platforms, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
Strong communicator—able to develop compelling, clear, and focused messages and effectively present them at the executive level.
Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach engineers (across all levels) on technical challenges and career development.
Experience contributing to technical vision and advocating for engineering best practices across a portfolio.
Skilled in developing and implementing techniques to quantify the cost of technical debt and determine when to address it.
Ability to advocate for and design automated processes and tooling that ensure product delivery is correct, secure, and safe to deploy.
Proactive in identifying and driving opportunities for improvement by regularly reviewing delivery and production metrics.
Strong problem-solving skills, simplifying complex technical challenges into clear, actionable outcomes for teams.
A commitment to fostering a psychologically safe, inclusive environment that supports collaboration and innovation.
What you'll do:
Technical coaching and mentoring our engineers to reach their full potential
Assist the teams to contribute to and translate architecture into a technical vision and roadmap across the domain and then assist in implementing that vision over time
Collaborate with various organisational platforms, to deliver on best engineering practices
Work with our teams to create solutions while meeting requirements and balancing the goals and constraints of current solution design with desired end state with the responsibility for ensuring the right tool/framework/technique is used for the right job
Championing and driving engineering principles and practices including assisting in the implementation of new standards, technologies or methodologies
Provide guidance on non-functional design elements in solutions including security, scalability and performance, monitoring and alerting, analytics, documentation and quality
Guide and influence technical related decisions across the teams
Why Xero? 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, free medical insurance, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
Principal Engineering - Product & Technology