Principal Engineer (Payments Growth & Experience)

Principal Engineer (Payments Growth & Experience) THE ROLE AND IT'S IMPACT Xero reimagined accounting software. Now, we’re reimagining the flow of money itself. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy for payments growth by designing and building features that directly improve how small businesses manage their money. Your work involves running high-velocity experiments across the full stack to increase product adoption while developing smart, AI-driven capabilities that automate workflows and save customers precious time. As a technical leader, you will stay close to the code, guiding teams through complex challenges and ensuring best practices across both frontend and backend development. You will spend a significant portion of your time hands-on, writing and reviewing code while partnering closely with product and design leads to solve complex customer problems at scale. Your impact will be felt through the rapid design and execution of experiments, using data-driven feedback to identify small changes that can result in significant product growth. By building and releasing impactful features, you will directly improve the end-to-end journey for small businesses, specifically focusing on how they get paid. THE TEAM AND HOW THEY CONNECT You will be part of the Payments Growth and Experience team, collaborating closely with product leads and designers to solve real-world problems for millions of small businesses. You will influence and enable engineering teams across Australia, New Zealand, and North America to conduct effective, data-driven experiments. The team operates with a hybrid, high-trust culture, connecting through regular workshops to embed experimentation best practices across the portfolio. You'll also join a global community of Principal Engineers across Xero, driving engineering standards, architecture, and best practices. THE TEAM IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON: - Leading testing and growth experiments using tooling like Statsig to reduce learning cycles. - Integrating AI tooling and agentic coding tools into daily development workflows to enhance engineering productivity. - Working with the broader payments team to create innovative solutions to core payments features and capabilities. - Utilising our modern tech stack featuring React, .NET, and AWS to build scalable full-stack solutions. WHERE AND HOW YOU CAN WORK This role can be based anywhere on the East Coast of Australia, with a preference for somebody based at one of our hubs in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. We offer a hybrid working model that balances office connection with flexibility, and while we prefer candidates near our offices, we are open to remote arrangements for the right person. You can also look forward to visiting our New Zealand teams roughly once a quarter for collaborative workshops. HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS WE ARE LOOKING FOR - Your background shows a deep curiosity for growth hacking and a proven ability to design and analyse A/B tests that drive product usage. - A strong interest in utilising AI tooling is essential, as you will model how to use these technologies to automate tasks and improve engineering outcomes. - Having worked on customer-facing SaaS products, you possess a genuine empathy for the challenges small business owners face. - Effective communication comes naturally to you, allowing you to influence senior leaders and partner seamlessly with cross-functional stakeholders. - Technical leadership is a core part of your toolkit, demonstrated through mentoring others and fostering a culture of rapid learning and innovation. - You possess a mastery of modern web technologies and full-stack development, with an interest in modern architecture and microservices. - You show a proactive mindset for solving complex engineering problems and have experience launching new products from the ground up. Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your ... (truncated, view full listing at source)