Lead Engineer - Salesforce

Xero; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Xero in Melbourne seeks a Platform Engineering leader to own the security, release, and operation of our Salesforce-powered platform. You’ll split time between hands-on coding, reviews, design decisions, incident response and proofs of concept.

Your impact is measured in leverage as the platform maintains high uptime, strong compliance, and rapid deployment. You’ll drive CI/CD, observability, and incident response while scaling capabilities across Australia, New Zealand and offshore partners.

Qualifications

• Technical leadership delivering and operating Salesforce at enterprise scale.
• Hands-on Salesforce development, code reviews and production work.
• Ownership of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering across major release cycles.

Responsibilities

• Platform security posture across Access control and governance.
• CI/CD and release engineering to keep shipping safe and fast.
• Platform observability and operational health to prevent issues and lead incident response.
• Build the agent route from idea to production with standards and observability.
• Data governance and compliance alignment with Data and Legal teams.
• Shape the platform's technical roadmap and RFC-driven design decisions.

Skills

Salesforce

Platform engineering

Security posture

CI/CD

Incident response

Code reviews

Design discussions

Technical leadership

Auth & Access control

Observability

Tools

GitHub

SFDX

RFCs & design docs

Job description

Xero's Salesforce platform powers our go-to-market solutions and increasingly serves as the core infrastructure for our agents. You'll own the technical direction for how our platform is secured, released and operated, spending roughly half your time in hands-on engineering work: code, code reviews, design reviews, incident response and proofs of concept.

Your impact is measured in leverage. Today the platform runs 99.95% uptime, 100% path-to-production compliance, zero Sev 1 and Sev 2 incidents, and 150–200 deployments monthly. You'll maintain that bar whilst scaling significantly.

This role lets you Go Bold by challenging how the platform is built, Go Fast by removing friction to production, Go Further by building things that last, and Go Together by lifting capability across every pod that depends on you.

The team and how they connect

The Platform team sits inside Customer Platforms, the engineering group behind Xero's go-to-market and customer experience technology. You'll work closely with engineering leaders across Security, Data, AI and with teams across Australia, New Zealand and offshore partners.

The role will focus on

Platform security posture. Access control, Connected Apps governance, vulnerability identification and remediation. You set standards and make secure the default.

CI/CD and release engineering. Our deployment pipeline and release programmes. You champion automation and make shipping safe and fast for every engineer building on the platform.

Platform observability and operational health. You grow observability, manage org limits, prevent customer-facing issues, lead incident response, and help shape how support shifts into our internal service model.

The agent path-to-production. You'll build the route for agentic changes from idea to production safely: evaluation baselines, observability, an agent registry, and shared standards. This is a new area with no established playbook.

Data governance and compliance. Partner with Data and Legal on GDPR deletion, retention, archival and data handling standards. Maintain and grow the D360 pipeline.

Technical direction and enablement. Shape the platform's technical roadmap, partner with Product on technical investment ROI, contribute to Xero's engineering standards through RFCs and design docs, and identify capabilities your delivery teams need.

Where and how you can work

Based in Melbourne; we encourage one day a week in the office to stay connected with your peers. The pods you support are distributed across Australia, New Zealand and offshore, so you're comfortable building trust and driving alignment asynchronously and in writing.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• Technical leadership delivering and operating Salesforce at enterprise scale, with a platform engineering mindset
• Depth and breadth as a Salesforce developer, hands-on across code, reviews and production work
• Ownership of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering across major release cycles; GitHub, SFDX and test automation experience
• Proven track record owning security posture on platforms other teams depend on
• Experience leading incident response and turning post-incident reviews into lasting changes
• The ability to make code and design decisions across multiple teams, and to lead architecture discussions that reach a decision
• Strong written technical communication—RFCs, design docs and post-incident reviews to create alignment through persuasion, not authority
• Fluent use of AI tooling in your own engineering, evolving your practice as tools change
• Coaching ability with senior engineers; a force multiplier through code review standards and practices you set
• Partnership with Product—turning business goals into technical plans and pushing back on unclear scope