Principal Engineer - Payments Products & Platform

Xero is hiring a Principal Engineer for each of two connected engineering portfolios: Payments Products & Experiences and Payments Platform. The roles focus on shaping payments strategy over the next two to three years, with domain-level influence across multiple teams. The portfolios include checkout, payment methods, flexible payments, AI payment agents, provider integrations, bill payments and a product-agnostic API. Work is hybrid, based in Sydney or Melbourne, with colleagues across Australia and the US and across time zones.

Responsibilities

Shape technical strategy across multiple teams; partner with senior stakeholders to turn complex requirements into scalable, resilient systems; stay close to technical detail and set the example for a portfolio of 40 to 50 engineers; drive engineering standards, architecture and best practices across a global community of Principal Engineers; set long-term direction; bring product, engineering and senior stakeholders along; mentor Staff and Senior engineers; shape cross-team initiatives; set standards that lift engineering across Xero

Requirements

Deep experience designing and running large-scale distributed systems in production, balancing reliability, performance and cost; API-first thinking; fluency in at least one modern backend language; experience with SQL and NoSQL stores; experience with cloud-native platforms (ideally AWS); ability to make clear, practical calls on whether to extend, migrate or build legacy systems; staying hands-on through pairing, spikes and code; strong interest in utilising AI tooling is essential; deep curiosity for growth hacking; proven ability to design and analyse A/B tests that drive product usage

Nice to have

Payments or fintech experience