Lead Engineer

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? At Xero, we live by our core values: - We make it beautiful: Create experiences that customers love. - We make it happen: Move fast on the right things and value progress over perfection. - We make it human: Care personally, challenge respectfully, and prioritize wellbeing. - We make it together: Collaborate transparently to build trust and achieve shared goals. 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.