Remote Search Engineer — Scale High-Performance Search

Xero; Brisbane; Remote; AUD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Xero is seeking a Search Engineer to help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the region. You’ll contribute to high-scale search infrastructure powering thousands of users and collaborate with experienced engineers to grow your skills.

You’ll work on both search-specific and generalist engineering tasks, with opportunities for increasing responsibilities as you develop expertise and ownership. Remote Australia/NZ options apply.

Qualifications

• Experience building or maintaining search systems.
• Strong understanding of core software engineering principles and clean code.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and evolve a large search cluster used by 200,000+ daily users.
• Collaborate with senior engineers through code reviews and shared ownership.
• Contribute to platform-wide rebuilds and data ingestion/ODL initiatives.
• Work in a distributed team across Australia and New Zealand with occasional in-person collaboration.

Skills

Search engineering

Software fundamentals

Growth mindset

Collaboration

Ownership

Job description

The role & impact

As an Engineer on our Search team, you’ll own the infrastructure, CI/CD and data pipelines that keep one of the largest search clusters in the southern hemisphere healthy and growing. You’ll design and run the infrastructure automation and Terraform that underpin the cluster, build pipelines that move and index data at scale, and keep the platform fast, resilient and cost effective as demand grows. You’ll

Engineer, Search

The role & impact

As an Engineer on our Search team, you’ll own the infrastructure, CI/CD and data pipelines that keep one of the largest search clusters in the southern hemisphere healthy and growing. You’ll design and run the infrastructure automation and Terraform that underpin the cluster, build pipelines that move and index data at scale, and keep the platform fast, resilient and cost effective as demand grows. You’ll Go Bold by leading design decisions on scaling, reliability and capacity for a system holding hundreds of terabytes.

In your first 90 days, you’ll get up to speed on the cluster, the team and our platform rebuild, then start reviewing pull requests and making your first meaningful changes. Within 12 months, you’ll Go Further by owning a major project, contributing across both search and generalist work, and helping to shape how the team works.

The Team & How They Connect

Our Search team looks after one of the largest search clusters in the southern hemisphere, indexing more than 50 million documents a day, for around 200,000 daily active users at 99.9% uptime. We’re rebuilding and expanding the platform for Xero’s next stage of growth, working closely with the streaming data team, our product manager and Catalyst to plan and release changes safely. We’re remote-first across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand, and we get together in Melbourne roughly every six months.

The team is currently working on

• Tech stack: Github Actions and Terraform for infrastructure as code, with large-scale data pipelines feeding our search indexes.
• Current project: Rebuilding and expanding the search platform, including ingestion for our new platform alongside the streaming data team.
• Current project: Keeping the cluster highly available, owning monitoring, alerting and incident response to protect our 99.9% uptime.
• Future project: Owning and shaping a major platform project within your first year, spanning both search and generalist work.
  
  

Where And How You Can Work

This is a permanent, remote-first role across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand, so you can work from wherever you’re based. We get together in Melbourne roughly every six months, giving you time to connect with the team in person.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• You bring your experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, with hands-on skills in Github Actions and Terraform.
• You’ve designed and operated infrastructure pipelines that support complex platform scale environments and know how to keep them reliable under heavy demand.
• Solid software engineering skills and a high-quality mindset sit at the heart of how you work.
• Search or information retrieval experience, or a clear path to applying it, will help you hit the ground running.
• You communicate clearly, work well across remote teams and can explain trade-offs to people outside engineering.
  
  

Apply even if your experience isn’t a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.