Lead Engineer - Payments Platform

About the Role

For a small business, getting paid isn’t an abstract technical problem. It affects whether they can pay their people, buy supplies and take on their next opportunity. We connect money movement with financial context to help small businesses manage cash flow with greater confidence.

Payments is one of Xero’s biggest areas of investment and growth. As a Lead Engineer on Payments Platform, you’ll join early-stage initiatives and make foundational architectural decisions for capabilities that power money movement across Xero and enable new product lines globally. Your work can span shared platform capabilities and customer-facing payment products, including global bill payments.

You’ll stay hands-on in production code and proofs of concept while setting the technical direction other engineers and teams build on. It’s an opportunity to shape both the technology and the engineering practices of a growing team, with a direct connection to the problems small businesses face every day

The Technical Challenges

• A shared payments platform: Build orchestration, risk and fraud, and multi-provider capabilities that work across products and markets, helping teams launch new payment products faster without rebuilding the same foundations.

• Global bill payments: Make a complex financial process feel simple for small businesses while keeping it accurate, secure and connected to the accounting record.

• High throughput at scale: Design reliable, secure distributed services that remain dependable under real-world production constraints.

• Customer impact alongside architectural progress: Selectively rebuild and enhance existing systems, delivering value quickly while moving toward a coherent long-term architecture.

• AI capabilities customers can trust: Apply AI to challenging product problems while protecting customer trust, and bring the same discipline to how we evaluate and operate those capabilities.

Impact

• First 6 months: You understand the payments platform, its consumers and the customer problems it enables teams to solve. You’ve shipped production code and aligned the team on the architecture and roadmap for at least one core capability, such as onboarding, orchestration, risk and fraud, or multi-provider support. Through mentorship, technical reviews and practical improvements, you’ve helped elevate the team’s engineering capability.

• First 12 months: Your architectural decisions are operating in production and helping new payment products launch faster. You’ve helped establish engineering standards and clear ownership for the Vancouver Payments team, and your work is reaching small businesses through faster, safer ways to pay and get paid.

Ownership

You’ll own the technical direction for your area of the payments platform, from design and proof of concept through production and on-call. You’ll lead architecture, API design and technology decisions for that area, with end-to-end accountability for reliability, security and operational excellence.

You’ll work closely with engineering and cross-functional partners to make trade-offs explicit and turn direction into delivery. Your impact will come from both your own technical contributions and the capability you build in others.

Because both the initiative and the Vancouver team are early in their development, you’ll also help shape engineering practices, quality standards and AI-assisted ways of working that make the team more effective over time.

Who You'll Work With

• Lili Kan, GM/VP, Payments Platform Engineering. Lili brings extensive experience building platforms and leading engineering teams in Silicon Valley. She previously led Payment Intelligence engineering at Stripe, building systems that protect payments from fraud. Before that, she spent four years at Uber, working across platform services, systems for operating self-driving fleets, and Driver Safety & Insurance Engineering.

• Jing Feng, Head of Engineering, Payments Platform. Jing brings engineering leadership experience from Uber, Apple, LinkedIn and Yahoo. Most recently, she led Risk Product Engineering at Uber, building capabilities to detect and prevent fraud and risk.

What You Bring

Must-have:

• A proven track record of delivering highly available distributed backend systems and high-throughput services under real-world production constraints, with strong operational practices.

• Experience building platforms or products from an early idea into production, then evolving them as adoption and complexity grow.

• Deep understanding of system architecture, API design, and relational and non-relational databases, including the trade-offs between different approaches.

• Proficiency in a modern backend stack, such as C#, Java, Go or C++, and experience with cloud-native platforms such as AWS.

• Strong technical leadership: setting direction, mentoring engineers, fostering an inclusive culture and breaking complex problems into clear, actionable plans that lead to delivery.

• A hands-on approach to production code, proofs of concept and technical deep dives, alongside advanced use of AI tools to improve development workflows, with appropriate judgment and validation.

Nice to have:

• Experience in payments, fintech or money movement, such as payment orchestration, risk and fraud, or multi-provider integrations. Experience from adjacent domains with demanding reliability, security or correctness requirements is valuable too.

• Experience selectively rebuilding or modernizing established systems while continuing to deliver value to customers.

• A strong track record of partnering with Product, Design and other cross-functional teams to turn complex business needs into resilient engineering solutions.

How We Work

We’re bold in our vision and pragmatic in execution, delivering useful improvements along the way rather than waiting for a large rewrite. We invest in AI to learn faster and focus effort on higher-value problems, while engineers stay accountable for what they ship. We use shared frameworks to avoid reinvention, leaving teams room to innovate. Engineers own their work, including quality, reliability, and on-call. Leaders set context and priorities, and engineers help shape the solutions.

Where We Work

We offer a hybrid model that blends the flexibility of working from home with the collaboration of the office, including designated boost days in our modern office spaces. This role is open to hybrid candidates in Vancouver, British Columbia, or San Mateo, California. We also welcome applications from candidates across Canada interested in relocating to Vancouver, and from remote candidates in Seattle, Washington.

Our Hiring Process

1. TX phone screen (45 minutes): a conversation with your Talent Specialist about your background, motivations and the role.

2. Technical assessments: a coding assessment and a systems design assessment, run through an independent third-party provider and based on real-world scenarios.

3. Technical deep dive (45–60 minutes): with a Principal Engineer and the hiring team. You'll walk through a past project you led, covering how you thought about it, executed it and led through its complexity.

4. Values / Future Proof Xero (45 minutes): how you show up day to day, aligned with Xero's values and capabilities such as adaptability, ownership, customer thinking and AI fluency.

5. LEADership (45–60 minutes): real examples of how you lead, influence and deliver in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, assessed against Xero's leadership principles.

Compensation & Total Rewards

At Xero, we value the impact and skills you bring to the team. We don’t just hire for a role; we invest in people. We believe in a Total Package philosophy - which means your value isn't just a single number on a paycheque. While base salary is a core component, we look at your compensation through a holistic lens that includes equity, performance incentives, and world-class benefits.

The expected base salary range for this role in:

• Washington, WA & San Mateo, CA: $206,000 - $260,000 USD

Individual pay is determined by various factors, including geography, level of experience, and the specific skills you bring to the role.

In addition to base pay, Xero’s roles are eligible for the following forms of variable compensation:

• Variable Pay: Permanent employees are eligible to participate in our annual bonus and equity (RSU) programs. You may also be eligible for performance-based cash or equity (RSUs) incentives depending on your role level, and company performance.

• Comprehensive Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) match, and 21 days PTO, 10 days of Wellbeing leave, 5 days of Xtra Leave, 1 volunteer day, 12 paid holidays, paid parental leave. Further information included on our Xero Perks page

Xero uses AI to help screen applications based on job-related qualifications. These tools assist our recruiters but do not make automated hiring decisions. A human recruiter reviews all candidates before any hiring action is taken.