Principal Engineer – Payments Platform & Experiences

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

Job summary

Xero is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape technical strategy across Payments Products, Experiences and Platform. You will influence multiple teams, mentor engineers, and help define a multi-year payments architecture.

The role sits in a global Principal community, with hands-on leadership across AWS-backed microservices and data layers. Based in Australia, you’ll work in a hybrid setup with Sydney or Melbourne offices and collaborate across time zones to enable scalable, resilient systems

Qualifications

• Experience designing and running large-scale distributed systems in production.
• API-first thinking across web, API and data layers.
• Fluency in at least one modern backend language and cloud-native platforms (ideally AWS).
• Hands-on approach: pairing, spikes and code in legacy-heavy systems.
• Strong interest in AI tooling to automate tasks and improve outcomes.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers and drive cross-team initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical strategy across multiple teams and translate complex requirements into scalable systems.
• Maintain hands-on involvement while setting engineering standards and practices.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to align product, engineering and business goals.
• Lead and mentor engineers across the Principal community within Xero.
• Drive multi-year payments architecture and global readiness for new markets.

Skills

Distributed systems

API-first

Cloud-native

Mentoring

A/B testing

AI tooling

Tools

AWS

SQL

NoSQL

C#

Java

Go

C++

Job description

Xero is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape technical strategy across Payments Products, Experiences and Platform. You will influence multiple teams, mentor engineers, and help define a multi-year payments architecture.

The role sits in a global Principal community, with hands-on leadership across AWS-backed microservices and data layers. Based in Australia, you’ll work in a hybrid setup with Sydney or Melbourne offices and collaborate across time zones to enable scalable, resilient systems