Lead Software Engineer - Payments

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.

Xero Payments - Help Small Businesses Thrive by Powering the Future of Cash Flow

We know that for small businesses, managing cash flow isn’t just important—it’s everything. That’s why our Payments team is reimagining how money moves through the Xero platform: faster, smarter, and seamlessly embedded in everyday workflows.

Whether it’s getting paid, paying bills, or running payroll, we’re building intuitive, intelligent systems that make cash flow management effortless. Join us and help shape the tools that keep small businesses moving forward!

Our payments products and platforms directly support the core jobs for millions of small businesses globally. They’re growing fast and evolving constantly. We embrace platform thinking as a force multiplier, while continuously improving the product for our small businesses through experimentation. We're passionate about AI in our development tools and products, and we're looking for people who share that enthusiasm. It’s a space of big impact, bold ambition, and incredible opportunity.

About the role

As a Lead Engineer at Xero, you'll be a role model for engineering excellence, supporting your team to grow their technical capability and improve development practices.

We believe that a solid technical foundation and strong growth mindset are the keys to success in Software Engineering. You won’t find a long list of must-have tech requirements below!

• Previous tenure in a Lead Engineer / Technical Lead role, with experience delivering software solutions at scale.
• Proficiency in at least one of C#, NodeJS or React, with practical experience in building applications using any of these frameworks.
• You'll be a master of your art, well versed across the full development and implementation lifecycle.
• Proven experience in auditing teams codebases, aiming to maintain high standards for security, testability, and to make changes easily; coupled with the ability to make code design decisions for all teams’ products.
• Proven leadership in on-call practices and deep understanding of monitoring and observability tooling to proactively manage, troubleshoot, and optimise production systems at scale.
• Proven experience designing and building modern engineering stacks, ideally with hands-on experience working in AWS.
• Ability to lead and/or facilitate discussions on application design and implementation for your team's products.
• You'll come with strong leadership traits, and a proven track record of coaching and mentoring engineers across multiple disciplines, with Xero's values at heart.
• Proven skills to break down a problem into digestible chunks, including weighing up the pros and cons of a potential solution.

• Stay hands-on: Dedicate at least 50% of your time to technical tasks, including code and design reviews, technical kick-offs, legacy code exploration, proof-of-concept development, and incident response.
• Lead by example: Set the technical direction for the team, mentor team members, and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Drive innovation: Encourage experimentation and the adoption of new technologies to improve our products and processes.
• Collaborate effectively: Work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to deliver high-quality solutions.
• Solve complex problems: Tackle challenging technical problems and find innovative solutions.

Why Xero? 

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond, and that includes our candidates. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience, but you could be just the right person for this role. If you are excited about working at Xero, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway.

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, health insurance and dental reimbursement with vision allowances, a  healthcare spending account, fertility and family forming financial support, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with shared meals, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.