Role overview

Xero is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to join its Search team, which maintains and evolves one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. This role offers genuine technical scale, managing 50+ million searchable documents and 400 terabytes of searchable data while serving over 200,000 daily active users. You will contribute to a significant four-year platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero’s infrastructure.

Key responsibilities

Maintain and evolve the search cluster to ensure 99.9% uptime whilst supporting millions of daily active users.
Contribute to both search-specific and generalist engineering work across the platform.
Raise and review pull requests, ensuring high code quality standards are met throughout the team.
Lead technical projects, particularly contributing to the large-scale search platform rebuild (Horizon 2).
Work on integrating the Operational Data Layer (ODL) into the ingestion pipeline for the new platform.
Explore new partnership opportunities with Mobile, Files, and AI-adjacent search capabilities as the platform evolves.

Requirements

Demonstrated strong search engineering experience with proven ability to build, maintain and scale search systems in production environments handling hundreds of millions of documents.
Solid software engineering fundamentals and development skills, with comfort contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work.
High standards for code quality, with a strong commitment to writing and reviewing code properly and thoughtfully.
Strong collaborative skills, working effectively with engineering, product and infrastructure teams in a distributed environment.

What makes this role worth considering

The Search team is a small, experienced group distributed across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand, supported by a dedicated Product Manager and Principal Architect. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day, with the team gathering in Melbourne approximately every six months to align in person. Xero also offers boost days allowing you to work from the office and collaborate with the broader community when it suits you.