Role overview

As a Lead Engineer on Xero’s Payments Platform, you’ll drive foundational architectural decisions for payment systems that help small businesses manage cash flow and access money movement capabilities. Payments is one of Xero’s major growth areas, and you’ll work on early-stage initiatives that enable new product lines globally, including complex features like global bill payments and multi-provider payment orchestration.

Key responsibilities

Own the technical direction for a core area of the payments platform, from design and proof of concept through production deployment and ongoing operations.
Lead architectural, API design and technology decisions that balance reliability, security and operational excellence with customer needs.
Stay hands-on with production code and proof-of-concept work while setting the technical vision other engineers and teams will build upon.
Work closely with engineering and cross-functional partners to make trade-offs explicit and translate direction into shipped features.
Help shape engineering practices, quality standards and AI-assisted development workflows that strengthen the growing Vancouver Payments team.
Mentor engineers, conduct technical reviews and elevate the team’s engineering capability through practical improvements and guidance.

Requirements

Proven track record delivering highly available distributed backend systems and high-throughput services in production environments with strong operational practices.
Experience building platforms or products from early concept into production, then evolving them as adoption and complexity increase.
Deep understanding of system architecture, API design, and both relational and non-relational databases, including trade-offs between different approaches.
Proficiency in modern backend languages such as C#, Java, Go or C++, with experience deploying on cloud-native platforms like AWS.
Strong technical leadership skills including setting direction, mentoring engineers, fostering inclusive culture and breaking complex problems into actionable delivery plans.
Hands-on approach to production code and technical deep dives, with advanced use of AI tools to improve development workflows and appropriate judgment in their application.

What makes this role worth considering

You’ll work directly with experienced leadership: Lili Kan (formerly leading Payment Intelligence at Stripe and platform teams at Uber) and Jing Feng (who led Risk Product Engineering at Uber after roles at Apple, LinkedIn and Yahoo). The Vancouver Payments team is in early development, giving you genuine influence over engineering culture and long-term architecture. Your work directly impacts how small businesses access payment capabilities and manage their cash flow.