Lead Engineer

At Xero, our purpose is to make running a business beautiful by empowering small businesses with world-class technology. The Reporting Platform is one of the most heavily used products across the entire Xero suite, serving over 150 reports—such as Profit & Loss and Revenue statements—to millions of users, accountant...

As part of our growing engineering group, this team operates across Wellington and Vancouver. We are seeking a Lead Engineer to bridge drive technical initiatives in your pod, modernize legacy frameworks, and drive engineering maturity across high-scale platform systems.

In this position, you will balance your time roughly 50% hands-on coding and executing projects alongside senior engineers and 50% strategic focusing on technical discovery, incident management, and long-term roadmap planning.

Hands-on Delivery & Architecture for Product Features in Reporting: Lead technical design and implementation, balancing speed, quality, and architectural standards across complex systems to deliver features in Reporting
Modernize Legacy Systems: Guide software application development to modernize legacy .NET frameworks, safely shifting traffic and rolling out updates at scale.
Drive AI Integration: Capitalize on unique opportunities to embed AI directly into our reporting products and software development lifecycle (SDLC) and improve the overall Engineer experience in reporting.
Incident Management & Quality: Lead incident response, participate in the team's on-call roster, and establish robust testing and continuous deployment strategies.
Team Leadership & Mentorship: Elevate team capability by coaching senior engineers, improving multi-quarter project planning, and fostering an inclusive engineering culture.

We care more about your ability to build high-scale systems and solve complex architectural challenges than rigid formal credentials.
Large-Scale System Experience: Experience operating in high-volume, high-transaction environments (e.g., Fintech, Banking, Major SaaS, or Medtech).
Full-Stack Proficiency: Experience or strong familiarity with full-stack development, particularly .NET / C#, React, and SQL (tech stack experience is preferred/nice-to-have, with legacy modernization expertise prioritized).
Proven Technical Maturity & Ownership: A bias for action, strong communication skills, and a builder mindset where you take accountability for end-to-end deliverables.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Ability to facilitate technical discovery, break down operational silos, and align stakeholders across multi-quarter initiatives.