Principal Engineer - Backend/Platform Engineering

Xero; Sydney; Remote; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Xero is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Engineering Productivity team. You will partner with the engineering community to build developer-first platform tools that remove barriers, enabling thousands of engineers to ship high-impact software faster and safer.

This role involves collaborating across teams to tackle complex technical challenges and drive meaningful change. You will work in a distributed, remote-first environment across Australia and New Zealand, with on-site sessions as

Qualifications

• Experience in DevEx, DevOps or Platform Engineering building developer-focused products.
• Platform mindset: design for engineers as customers with scalable solutions.
• Comfort with ambiguity and fast-changing roadmaps; Go Bold/Go Fast.
• Strong communication to influence senior stakeholders and executives.
• Exposure to or hands-on with AI-native development practices.
• Mentor and grow others through influence, not authority.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive platform tooling that accelerates engineering velocity.
• Collaborate across teams to identify high-impact, cross-cutting problems.
• Scale developer workflows and AI-native development lifecycles across the org.
• Partner with product and leadership to improve tooling and practices.

Skills

DevEx

DevOps

Platform Engineering

Platform-as-a-Product

Communication

AI-native development

Mentoring

Job description

The role & impact

As a Principal Engineer in our Engineering Productivity team, you'll partner with our engineering community to build frictionless, developer-first platform tools that remove barriers and empower engineers to focus on what they do best; shipping high-impact software faster, safer, and at scale. Your work directly shapes how thousands of engineers across Xero work, influencing the tools, practices, and cultures that enable them to succeed.

The role & impact

As a Principal Engineer in our Engineering Productivity team, you'll partner with our engineering community to build frictionless, developer-first platform tools that remove barriers and empower engineers to focus on what they do best; shipping high-impact software faster, safer, and at scale. Your work directly shapes how thousands of engineers across Xero work, influencing the tools, practices, and cultures that enable them to succeed. You'll tackle some of the most complex technical challenges across our organisation, from optimising developer workflows to scaling our AI-native development practices. In this role, you're not assigned to a single team; instead, you'll work across our engineering landscape to identify and solve the highest-impact problems - collaborating with multiple teams and stakeholders to drive meaningful change.

The Team & How They Connect

Engineering Productivity is a specialist team within Xero's engineering organisation, focused on enabling our developer community through platforms and tooling. We collaborate closely with product teams, infrastructure teams, and technical leadership across the organisation to remove friction and accelerate delivery. Our team operates with high trust, psychological safety, and a genuine commitment to diverse perspectives - we believe the best solutions come from teams that think differently.

The team is currently working on

• Inner-Loop Mastery: Supercharging local coding speed and developer experience through our Xero AI Engineering Toolkit
• Frictionless Delivery: Accelerating pull request reviews and environment provisioning to unblock our outer-loop development flow
• Unified Tooling: Consolidating our developer toolchain to eliminate context switching and cognitive load across our engineering teams
• Uncompromising Quality: Balancing speed with engineering excellence using Tech Health Scorecards and sustainable development practices

Where And How You Can Work

This is a distributed role across Australia and New Zealand. Our teams are predominantly remote-first, with occasional in-person gatherings to strengthen connections and tackle complex problems together. We hold 1-2 on-site sessions per quarter (typically in Melbourne or Wellington/Auckland), and we maintain flexible working hours and arrangements to support your personal circumstances. We believe great technical work happens when people have autonomy over how and where they work.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• You bring demonstrated expertise in DevEx, DevOps, or Platform Engineering, with a proven track record of building products and platforms that engineers love to use
• You possess a platform-as-a-product mindset - you think deeply about your customers (engineers), understand their pain points, and design solutions that scale elegantly
• You're comfortable navigating ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments and can thrive when roadmaps shift and requirements remain fluid - you Go Bold and Go Fast even when the path isn't entirely clear
• Your communication skills enable you to influence and collaborate with senior technical stakeholders and executives across the organisation, translating complex technical concepts into compelling narratives
• You bring either exposure to or hands‑on experience with AI-native development practices, spec-driven development, or modern AI development lifecycles that shape how we build tomorrow
• You mentor and grow others through influence and example rather than authority, helping engineers and teams level up and discover their potential