Lead Engineer - Making Payments

Xero; Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Xero is seeking a Lead Engineer in Making Payments to own the technical lifecycle of bill payments for small businesses. You will set direction, translate it into a plan, and guide a team to deliver while maintaining live systems.

The role blends hands-on coding with architectural leadership and AI-enabled ways of working. You’ll join a team of 8–10 engineers across Australia, collaborating with product, design, security, risk, legal and compliance, and partner teams in North America to scale

Qualifications

• Experience delivering backend systems at scale.
• Experience in payments/fintech preferred.
• Ability to design secure APIs.
• Experience with AWS and databases.

Responsibilities

• Define and build core platform services.
• Architect the future of payments.
• Stay hands-on in code and design.
• Solve complex problems at scale.
• Drive technical excellence across the team.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, security, risk and operations.
• Mentor and grow engineers at different levels.
• Ensure operational excellence and reliability.
• Drive innovation with AI integration.

Skills

Senior technical role

API design

Cloud experience

Team mentoring

AI tools experience

Tools

AWS

Postgres

DynamoDB

C#

Java

Go

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

The role

As a Lead Engineer in Making Payments, part of Xero's Payments Platform, you will own the technical lifecycle of bill payments: the way small businesses pay their bills and their people through Xero. When payouts land smoothly, a business's cash flow stays healthy, so your work has a real and visible effect on the customers we serve. You will set the technical direction, turn it into a clear, sequenced plan, then guide the team as they deliver it and look after the health of our systems once they are live.

You will stay hands-on, raise the bar for engineering quality, and help the team adopt AI-led ways of working. You will also coach and mentor engineers at different stages of their careers, with deep exposure to payments at scale and room to shape architecture, delivery and team capability.

The team & how they connect

You'll join Making Payments, a team of around 8 to 10 mid-level and senior engineers within the Payments Platform, looking after the bill payments experience across multiple regions as we expand our payment offerings globally. You'll collaborate closely with product, design, security, risk, legal and compliance, as well as Principal Engineers and partner teams in North America.

The technical environment and the impact

• Our stack: .NET (C#), AWS, Postgres and DynamoDB, with an API-first, mostly backend focus and tier 1 services that need high availability and test coverage above 90%
• Hard Problems, High Scale: Solve complex fintech problems: global rails, orchestration, compliance, fraud designs and more.
• Early Stage, Real Ownership: Define foundational systems that future revenue and product lines will depend on.
• Massive Impact: Shape a global payments platform critical to Xero's revenue and customer growth.

Where and how you can work

You'll be based in Sydney or Melbourne, working a hybrid model that blends time together in our modern offices with the flexibility of working from home. Boost days bring teams together to connect and collaborate in person on Wednesday's and Thursday's. You'll be part of a globally distributed team across Australia and the US.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• You bring hands-on experience in a senior technical role such as Staff Engineer or Tech Lead, delivering highly available, distributed backend systems at scale, ideally in payments, fintech or another regulated space.
• Your depth in system architecture and API design shows in secure, high-throughput services, including knowing when a synchronous API fits and when an asynchronous, event-based design serves customers better.
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (C# is a bonus, but Java, Go or C++ work too) comes with cloud-native experience, ideally AWS, and both SQL and NoSQL databases.
• You Go Fast by breaking complex problems into clear, actionable plans and following through, keeping security, testability, observability and on-call health front of mind.
• You Go Together building trusted relationships across engineering, product, risk and operations, and coaching engineers at every stage of their careers.
• You Go Bold with AI, using AI tools hands-on to speed up engineering and exploring how AI can strengthen the platform.

What you'll do

• Define and build core platform services
• Architect the future of payments
• Stay hands-on
• Solve complex problems
• Drive technical excellence
• Collaborate cross-functionally
• Mentor and grow engineers
• Ensure operational excellence
• Drive innovation with AI

Xero uses AI to help screen applications based on job-related qualifications. These tools assist our recruiters but do not make automated hiring decisions. A real human recruiter reviews all candidates before any hiring action is taken.