Lead Engineer - Platform

Xero; Auckland; On-site; NZD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company in Auckland is seeking a full-stack engineer with strong technical leadership skills to guide complex software projects. You will work with AWS, Terraform, and a range of modern languages, contributing to codebases and shaping the technical direction of critical projects. This role offers flexible working, generous benefits, and a chance to excel in a supportive environment.

Benefits

Generous paid leave

Employee Assistance Program

Free medical insurance

Flexible working hours

Career development opportunities

26 weeks paid parental leave

Qualifications

• Significant knowledge in Terraform and state management.
• Deep cloud knowledge, especially in AWS.
• Strong understanding of authentication and authorization patterns.
• Experience of modern product and engineering principles.
• Understanding of cloud technologies and CI/CD systems.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship.
• Actively write code and contribute to the codebase.
• Shape architecture and define long-term technical vision.
• Champion high standards for code quality.

Skills

Technical leadership

Full-stack engineering

Cloud knowledge

Security knowledge

CI/CD systems

Containerisation technologies

API development

Tools

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Azure

Python

Go

Typescript

Bash

Job description

Our Purpose

At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

Platform Elements is a cross-functional agile infrastructure development team. The Platform Elements team builds platform products to enable Xero development teams to build and ship software in a fast, reliable and secure manner. Platform Elements leverages modern cloud computing tooling and continuous integration practices. Through our customer centric approach we aim to reduce the cognitive load for Xero Product teams.

Sonic build and manage several key Products at Xero that enable other teams to rapidly provision and manage resources in the Cloud (primarily AWS but we're looking at supporting Azure and GCP soon!). We make everything we build self-service so that we are not the bottleneck for developers.

What you'll do:

• Lead from the front: Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship, fostering a culture of high-velocity, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Be a hands-on coder: Actively write code and contribute to the codebase, tackling our most complex technical challenges.
• Drive our technical direction: In collaboration with other lead engineers and our principal engineer, you'll shape the architecture and define the long-term technical vision for our most critical and innovative projects.
• Raise the bar: Champion high standards for code quality through thoughtful PR reviews, and by improving our testing, CI/CD, and security practices.

You will have the opportunity to work with the below technologies:

• Cloud: AWS (RDS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch), GCP, Azure
• IaC & Automation: Terraform, Atlantis, Kora, Git
• Languages: Python, Go, Typescript, Bash (tooling and scripting)
• Monitoring: CloudWatch, New Relic
• Security/Compliance: IAM, KMS, Cloud Custodian, OPA

You will have

• A strong capability for technical leadership and full-stack engineering, with the ability to guide complex software projects from concept to launch. Significant knowledge in Terraform, state management, pipelining tooling.
• Deep cloud knowledge, especially AWS. You will need to be strong with troubleshooting and understanding IAM and managing granular permissioning as well as understanding common AWS primitives at a deep level and be familiar with general cloud governance.
• Deep security knowledge, needs a strong understanding of authentication and authorisation languages and patterns for both web service identities like oauth, credential exchange and general policy language
• Experience of modern product and engineering principles and practices
• Understanding of cloud technologies and experience with CI/CD systems
• Understanding of containerisation technologies
• Experience writing APIs and infrastructure-as-code

Why Xero?

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, free medical insurance, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.