Senior Search Engineer

Xero; Sydney; On-site; AUD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Xero is seeking a Senior Engineer for its Search team to help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere, serving hundreds of millions of documents at global scale with high uptime.

You will own and contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review PRs, and lead critical projects. The role offers flexible work location within Australia or NZ with periodic in-person gatherings.

Qualifications

• Strong search engineering experience in production environments.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals.
• High bar for code quality and thoughtful reviews.
• Ability to collaborate across distributed teams (engineering, product, infra).
• Bonus: exposure to data or AI tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own and contribute across search-specific and generalist engineering work.
• Raise and review pull requests and lead projects.
• Contribute to the ongoing platform rebuild and scale initiatives.

Skills

Search engineering

Code quality

Collaborative

Production systems

Data/AI tooling

Job description

The role / impact

This is a role for a search specialist who wants to work at genuine scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere; part of an entire vertical stack delivered to customers. The work is both meaningful and technically stretching: keeping hundreds of millions of searchable documents at global scale running at 99.9% uptime, while contributing to a significant platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero's growth.

Beyond the day-to-day, this role is about real ownership. You will contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review pull requests, and lead projects. If you are someone who cares about quality and gets energised by hard problems at scale, this is a place where your work will genuinely matter.

The Team & How They Connect

The Search team is a small, tight-knit group spread across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand. You will partner closely with a team who are building the ingestion layer for our platform, a dedicated Product Manager, and the Catalyst Platform team who coordinate changes and releases across services. The team brings a high-quality mindset to everything they do, and solves challenging technical problems together.

The team is currently working on

• A large-scale search platform rebuild - a multi-year project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, using a search cluster that processes that processes hundreds of millions of documents at global scale
• Maintaining and evolving the cluster to keep systems running at 99.9% uptime
• Collaborating with the ODL team on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform
• Future capability development in data and AI-adjacent search, as the platform continues to evolve

Where And How You Can Work

This role can be based in Australia or NZ. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day. The team comes together in Melbourne approximately every six months - a chance to connect, align, and spend time in person with colleagues across regions. Xero also offers boost days, giving you the option to work from the office and collaborate with the broader Xero community when it suits you.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

• You bring strong search engineering experience and know what it takes to build, maintain and scale search systems in a production environment
• Solid software engineering and development fundamentals are part of your toolkit, and you are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work
• Quality comes first for you - you hold a high bar for the code you write and review, and care about doing things properly
• Working collaboratively with others comes naturally to you, whether that is with engineering, product or infrastructure teams across a distributed environment
• Bonus points if you have exposure to data or AI tooling, though this is not a requirement to be considered