Senior Engineer - Engineering Experience at Xero

The 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. The 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.