Role overview

Xero is reimagining accounting software and is now making a strategic, multi-year investment in its Payments Platform to help small businesses move money globally. As Head of Engineering for Making Payments, you will lead multiple engineering teams responsible for building products and platform capabilities that enable businesses to pay bills and transfer funds securely and reliably. This role combines strategic leadership, technical judgment, and people leadership to shape how the Making Payments product and engineering organisation evolves.

Key responsibilities

Set engineering strategy and roadmap for Making Payments, ensuring alignment with Payments Platform priorities and product goals.
Partner with Product and Design to translate customer problems into solutions that balance customer value, commercial outcomes, technical health, and delivery confidence.
Provide architectural leadership for scalable, secure, and highly available payment systems, with visibility into system health, engineering quality, technical debt, and critical trade-offs.
Lead predictable delivery by establishing clear priorities, effective planning, proactive risk management, and strong stakeholder alignment.
Build operational excellence through service ownership, reliability, observability, incident learning, security practices, and continuous improvement.
Hire, develop, and support Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders while creating growth opportunities for engineers across the organisation.
Champion an inclusive, high-trust culture with strong ownership, clear decision-making, and bias toward action, while also leading practical adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading multiple engineering teams through Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, with a proven track record of setting direction and ensuring accountability.
Deep technical expertise in software architecture, distributed systems, cloud-native environments, reliability engineering, security, and systems operating at scale.
Strong product sense and strategic planning ability, with the capacity to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.
Track record of operating high-quality production systems and driving improvements in reliability, service ownership, and operational effectiveness.
Sound judgment in navigating complex trade-offs and experience partnering effectively across Product, Design, Risk, Operations, Security, and other cross-functional teams.
Demonstrated ability to develop talent and leaders, build inclusive and high-trust teams, manage conflict constructively, and advocate for AI adoption in engineering practices.
Experience in payments, financial services, or other complex or regulated domains is valuable.

What makes this role worth considering

This role offers the opportunity to shape the future of money movement at Xero through a strategically important, globally scaled platform organisation. You will lead both product and platform engineering as Making Payments grows from its early investment phase into a mature capability, making foundational architectural decisions that improve speed to market, resilience, and provider flexibility. The position is based in Melbourne with a hybrid working environment that combines office-based collaboration and remote flexibility, supported by boost days to bring teams together for connection and alignment.