The role / impact

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to join the engineering teams behind the Xero Accounting App (XAA), our flagship experience helping small business owners stay on top of their finances wherever they are.

This role is open to experienced web and backend engineering leaders, with React Native experience highly valued. Our teams commonly work with .NET and C# across backend and platform services, alongside TypeScript and React Native. You will balance high-velocity product delivery with a relentless focus on system health, engineering practices, and customer impact—while keeping your hands in the code and mentoring your squad to ship better, faster.

You will tackle open-ended problems, exercise high-level technical judgment, and define both the what and the how for your squad’s product and platform goals. You will lift squad performance by providing goal clarity, removing technical barriers, mentoring engineers, and establishing a psychologically safe, inclusive culture where people can do their best work.

The team / how they connect

We are the engineering teams behind the Xero Accounting experience across web, backend, and mobile. We thrive in a hybrid, high-velocity, cross-functional environment, partnering closely with Product and Design to deliver simple, reliable experiences for our customers.

We collaborate deeply across web, platform, backend, and mobile to ensure a seamless experience across all channels. We are investing in our React Native capability while continuing to evolve the web and backend foundations that power Xero’s products. This is an exciting time to join as we scale and accelerate value delivery for customers.

Your squad will focus on

Ship value

Lead and deliver high-impact customer workflows across web, backend, and—where relevant—mobile. These may include dashboards, notifications, tasks, insights, banking flows, and subscriptions. You will define the technical approach, make pragmatic trade-offs, and unblock your squad to move quickly without compromising quality.

Operational excellence

Champion a production-first mindset. Uphold our responsibility for availability, accuracy, security, and scalability by improving delivery pipelines, identifying and solving common failure patterns, and leading collaborative incident responses. You will establish proactive health monitoring practices and help keep systems resilient under pressure.

Engineering quality and velocity

Raise the technical bar by simplifying complex designs, addressing technical debt, improving performance, strengthening testability, and applying modern engineering practices—including AI-assisted development. You will help your squad ship customer value faster while building systems that are clean, maintainable, and designed to evolve.

Cross-channel customer experience

Work confidently across the web, backend, and mobile boundary. Ensure APIs, services, web experiences, and mobile clients work together effectively, and advocate for technical decisions that improve the end-to-end customer experience.

Where and how you can work

Our teams are located in Australia and this hybrid role is based in Melbourne or Sydney, offering the flexibility to balance deep-focus work with high-bandwidth collaboration in our beautiful offices.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

What we're looking for

Relevant technology experience: Experience with some of the following technologies: C#, PostgreSQL, Node.js, React, Swift, and Kotlin. React Native experience is preferred.
Collaborative approach: You are a strong team player who works effectively with others to find practical solutions.
Excellent communication: You can bridge the gap between technical and non-technical specialists and communicate complex ideas clearly.
Complex systems delivery: You have a proven track record of delivering technical solutions that span and integrate across multiple systems.
Web, API, and cloud experience: Experience in one or more of public and private API design and implementation, web application architecture, and development on modern cloud-based infrastructure and services.
Production ownership: You have a proven track record of supporting systems in production and contributing to their reliability and continuous improvement.
Engineering craftsmanship: You are passionate about leaving the codebase—and the engineers around you—better than you found them.

Core requirements

Lead-level software engineering experience: You have a strong track record delivering production software and providing technical leadership for a squad or team.
Web or backend expertise: You bring deep hands-on experience in web engineering, backend engineering, or both. You understand how to design, build, operate, and evolve reliable systems at scale.
.NET and C# experience: Experience building production services or web applications with .NET and C# is highly desirable, particularly in environments focused on reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
Strong technical judgment: You can turn ambiguity into clear technical direction, make pragmatic trade-offs, and influence decisions across product, design, and engineering.
Production ownership: You understand the responsibilities that come with operating customer-facing systems, including reliability, observability, security, performance, and incident response.
Hands-on leadership: You continue to contribute technically, review code, unblock engineers, and raise engineering standards while mentoring and growing others.
Cross-functional communication: You communicate clearly with engineers, product managers, designers, and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred strengths

React Native and TypeScript experience
Mobile-backend collaboration
Experience with web and mobile products
Software design mastery
Scaled product experience
Modern engineering practices

What success looks like

Your squad ships high-impact features on a regular cadence while maintaining system health and reliability.
You provide clear technical direction across web, backend, and mobile considerations.
Engineers in your squad are growing, taking ownership, and feeling empowered to make good technical decisions.
Incident response is collaborative and blameless, with learning translated into preventive improvements.
Your squad’s code is clean, well-tested, performant, secure, and maintainable.
Technical debt is tracked intentionally and managed alongside customer value.
You and your squad are trusted advocates for strong engineering practices across the wider organisation.
Where relevant, you help strengthen React Native and TypeScript capability across Xero.

Please apply even if your experience is not a perfect match. At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.

Lead Software Engineer (Web/Backend)