Lead Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: NZ: Auckland: Xero 4 (96 St Georges Bay Rd, Level 2 & 3)

Employment Type: FullTime

About Xero and the Team

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, accountants, and bookkeepers.

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.

About the Role

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.

Key Responsibilities:

• 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 teams 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.

What Youll Bring

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.

Why Join Us?

• High-Impact Work: Work on critical software used daily by millions of global small business customers.

• Growth & AI Opportunity: Help set the standard for modern development practices and spearhead early-stage AI initiatives in our product ecosystem.

• Flexible Working Environment: While Wellington is our preferred hub, we welcome applicants working remotely.

• Inclusive Values: We live by our values—We make it Xero, We make it beautiful, We make it happen, We make it human, and We make it together.

Apply even if your experience isnt 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.