The posting, in Xero's own words
archived Oct 20, 2026The role
Xero reimagined accounting software. Now we’re reimagining how small businesses get paid and how money moves. We're making a critical, multi-year investment in two connected engineering portfolios, Payments Products & Experiences and Payments Platform, and we're hiring a Principal Engineer for each. As our three-year payments strategy reaches a turning point, you'll help shape what comes next, with domain-level influence over the next two to three years. You'll shape technical strategy across multiple teams, partnering with senior stakeholders to turn complex requirements into scalable, resilient systems. Staying close to the technical detail, you'll set the example for a portfolio of 40 to 50 engineers. You'll also join a global community of Principal Engineers across Xero, driving engineering standards, architecture, and best practices. You'll Go Bold by setting long-term direction, and Go Together by bringing product, engineering and senior stakeholders with you.
The teams
Payments Products & Experiences: this portfolio is made up of our Get Paid and Growth teams, builds the checkout, payment methods, flexible payments and AI payment agents that help small businesses get paid on time. Payments Platform: this portfolio is the engine underneath, with provider integrations, bill payments and a single, product-agnostic API that other Xero teams build on. Together they move billions of dollars across more than 150,000 transactions a day, a number set to double as we grow into the UK and US.
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The teams are currently working on
Tech stack: microservices across web, API and data layers, built in languages such as C#, Java, Go or C++, running on AWS with SQL and NoSQL data stores. Current focus: reviewing existing payments systems to work out what to extend, migrate or rebuild, alongside Growth experiments and AI-powered payment chasing. Future focus: a multi-year payments architecture covering agentic payment workflows, payments inside AI assistants and recurring payments. Global scale: replatforming payment methods and designing global rails and a ledger ready for new markets.