Role / Impact
This role is a technical cornerstone of the engineering experience at Xero. As a Senior Engineer you are responsible for the architectural integrity and long‐term evolution of the distributed systems that power our global developer community. You don't just build; you lead the design and refactoring of complex, high‐stakes systems, ensuring they are resilient, scalable, and future‐proof.
By defining engineering standards and making high‐level design decisions, you will solve systemic technical challenges at a global scale. Your leadership ensures our internal integrations are seamless, providing the strategic infrastructure required to accelerate Xero's technical vision and multi‐year growth.
Team / How They Connect
The Horizon team is a high‐trust cohort of engineers based across Melbourne and New Zealand. As a Senior member, you play a pivotal role in fostering technical excellence and mentorship within the group. We collaborate deeply on our eventing platform and data discovery tools, maintaining a culture of rigorous peer review, architectural spikes, and shared ownership of complex problems.
The team is currently working on
* Scaling a global eventing platform using Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud to enable high‐throughput internal integrations.
* Leading the transition to Postgres to optimise eventing patterns and enhance data discovery capabilities.
* Finalising robust webhook implementations and architecting the technical strategy for the next generation of eventing.
* Championing a modern, polyglot stack including Terraform, AWS, C#, and TypeScript to drive developer productivity across the organisation.
Where and How You Can Work
This role is based in Melbourne with a flexible hybrid approach. While we empower autonomy, our Senior Engineers often lead the way in‐office twice a week to facilitate whiteboarding sessions, mentorship, and face‐to‐face collaboration that strengthens our team culture.
Here are some of the things we are looking for
* You bring a mastery of system design and distributed patterns, with the ability to navigate the trade‐offs of complex, large‐scale software.
* You have extensive experience architecting solutions with Kafka or similar technologies, solving deep integration and consistency challenges.
* You possess a sophisticated grasp of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and the ability to design secure, cost‐effective, and scalable AWS environments.
* You are an expert contributor in C# or TypeScript, comfortable setting the bar for code quality and maintainability across different languages.
* You are a natural mentor who proactively levels up the engineers around you and contributes to the broader Xero technical community.
* You thrive when owning major design milestones and enjoy the responsibility of evolving engineering frameworks that impact the entire business.
Apply even if your experience isn't 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.
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