Lead Engineer - Making Payments

K1 Industries; Sydney; 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. You’ll shape architecture, turn it into a clear plan, guide the team, and ensure health of live systems at scale, delivering reliable, compliant money movement.

Based in Sydney or Melbourne, you’ll work in a hybrid setup with global counterparts, collaborate with product, design, security and risk, and mentor engineers while driving AI-powered improvements across the payments platform.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in a senior technical role such as Staff Engineer or Tech Lead.
• Experience delivering highly available, distributed backend systems at scale, ideally in payments, fintech or another regulated space.
• Proficiency in modern backend languages (C#, Java, Go or C++).
• Cloud-native experience with AWS.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases.

Responsibilities

• Define and build core platform services for reliable, scalable, secure money movement capabilities.
• Stay hands-on by contributing production code, proofs of concept and technical deep dives.
• Drive technical excellence through design reviews and best practices for reliability, security and scale.
• Ensure operational excellence with on-call practices, observability, and high-performance systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate complex business needs into resilient engineering solutions.
• Mentor and grow engineers, fostering inclusion, collaboration and excellence.
• Drive innovation with AI tools and practices across the team.

Skills

Staff Engineer

Tech Lead

Distributed backend

Payments domain

Tools

C#

Java

Go

C++

AWS

PostgreSQL

DynamoDB

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’ll get 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 within Xero’s Payments Platform, helping build and scale the bill-payments experience for small businesses across regions. You’ll work closely with Product and Design, and collaborate with engineering, Security, Risk and Operations partners across Xero across timezones.

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: Global rails, orchestration, compliance, fraud design 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.

What you’ll do

• Define and build core platform services: Lead the design and development of reliable, scalable, secure services, and shape the technical foundation for Xero’s money movement capabilities.

• Stay hands-on: Contribute directly to production code, proofs of concept and technical deep dives.

• Drive technical excellence: Set a high bar for reliability, security and scale through design reviews and best practices.

• Ensure operational excellence: Lead on-call practices, build robust observability and champion high-performance, reliable systems.

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Translate complex business needs into resilient engineering solutions.

• Mentor and grow engineers: Act as a role model and coach, fostering a culture of inclusion, collaboration and excellence.

• Drive innovation with AI: Champion AI tools and practices across the team, from accelerating development workflows to strengthening the platform.

What we’re looking for

• Experience: 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.

• Architecture and API design: Depth in secure, high-throughput services, including knowing when a synchronous API fits and when an asynchronous, event-based design serves customers better.

• Technical foundations: Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (C# is a bonus, but Java, Go or C++ work too), 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.

• You Go Together by building trusted relationships across engineering, product, risk and operations.

• You Go Bold with AI by using AI tools hands-on in your own engineering work.

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 in person on Wednesdays and Thursdays. You’ll be part of a globally distributed team across Australia and the US.

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.