Principal Backend Engineer, Payments Platform

You’ll shape the technical vision and architecture for how millions of small businesses move money globally. You will set the direction for building scalable, reliable, resilient, and performant systems, while remaining hands-on to elevate engineering quality across teams. This is a rare opportunity to combine strategic, multi-year technical leadership with practical, execution-focused impact on a platform central to Xero’s future. Define and drive the long-term architecture and technical direction for the Payments Platform, balancing strategic vision with incremental delivery. Architect, design, and influence the implementation of highly scalable, reliable, and resilient systems powering global payments. Evaluate existing systems, decide when to reuse vs. rebuild, and design smooth migration paths that deliver value while modernizing the platform. Contribute to production code, review complex designs, and serve as a trusted expert for debugging and operational excellence. Partner with multiple product, security, risk, and platform teams to align strategies, resolve dependencies, and deliver cohesive solutions across Xero. Champion practices around observability, reliability, and performance; raise the bar for how Xero designs, deploys, and operates critical systems. Guide Staff and Senior engineers, building technical leadership capacity across the org. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence. Work closely with senior product and business leaders to ensure technical decisions align with customer and business outcomes. Bring industry best practices and emerging technologies into Xero, experimenting thoughtfully to push the platform forward.