Engineering Manager (Platform)
Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time
Opens Xero's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Lead and scale a high-impact platform engineering team of eight engineers at Xero, managing core services that power the accounting platform used by millions. This role combines technical leadership with strategic architecture planning, focusing on stabilizing systems post-recovery, migrating away from legacy databases, and building scalable infrastructure for the next two decades. Ideal for experienced engineering managers with SaaS scale experience and deep technical credibility seeking to make a meaningful impact on business-critical systems.
Responsibilities
- Team Leadership and Growth: Guide, mentor, and develop a team of eight software engineers across three locations (Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne), fostering a collaborative culture based on open communication and shared ownership. Create professional development opportunities and support engineers in advancing their careers while maintaining team cohesion across time zones.
- System Stability and Incident Management: Maintain and enhance the stability of high-throughput, business-critical platform services that power core Xero functionality. Build on recent recovery work to prevent outages, establish resilience practices, and implement monitoring and observability improvements to reduce incident frequency and impact.
- Legacy Database Migration Planning: Architect and oversee the strategic migration of services away from the legacy MyXero database toward modern, scalable infrastructure. Plan phased migration approaches, manage technical debt reduction, and ensure continuity of service during transition while minimizing business disruption.
- Long-Term Architecture Strategy: Develop and communicate a forward-looking architecture vision for platform services designed to support Xero's growth for the next twenty years. Collaborate with engineering leadership to define technical roadmaps, evaluate emerging technologies, and establish architectural principles that balance innovation with stability.
- Delivery and Performance Management: Ensure consistent delivery of platform features and improvements while managing technical complexity and risk. Balance rapid iteration with system reliability, establish delivery metrics, and create processes that enable the team to ship confidently while maintaining service level agreements.
- Technical Decision-Making and Architecture Review: Leverage technical depth to ask insightful questions about system design, trade-offs, and implementation approaches. Conduct architectural reviews, guide technology choices, and ensure engineering decisions align with long-term vision while respecting the expertise of engineers with deep system knowledge.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to ensure platform services meet evolving business requirements. Advocate for engineering needs while understanding product priorities, and foster relationships that enable seamless coordination across distributed teams and time zones.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Platform Architecture and Design
Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and platform design patterns. Experience evaluating and implementing scalable architectural approaches that support high-traffic services, with familiarity in system decomposition and service-oriented design.
Infrastructure and DevOps Tooling
Practical knowledge of infrastructure-as-code, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms. Working familiarity with monitoring, logging, and observability tools used to maintain reliability of production systems.
Database Technologies and Data Management
Experience with relational and non-relational databases, understanding of data modeling, query optimization, and schema design. Knowledge of legacy system modernization and database migration strategies at scale.
High-Throughput System Design
Demonstrated experience building, operating, or managing services that handle substantial transaction volume and traffic at scale. Understanding of performance optimization, caching strategies, and managing capacity for business-critical systems.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field
Formal education in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, or related discipline. Equivalent professional experience in software engineering roles may be considered as an alternative.
Continued Technical Learning
Commitment to staying current with platform engineering trends, cloud technologies, and architectural best practices through ongoing education, certifications, or professional development activities.
Experience
Engineering Leadership in Scaling Companies
Minimum 5+ years in tech/SaaS companies, with at least 2-3 years in engineering management roles. Proven track record leading platform, infrastructure, or backend engineering teams through periods of organizational growth and technical scaling.
System Recovery and Operational Excellence
Experience stabilizing and improving the health of inherited systems, post-incident recovery planning, and building resilience into platform services. Demonstrated ability to balance immediate operational needs with long-term technical improvements.
Legacy System Modernization
Track record leading efforts to migrate away from legacy systems, including planning phased transitions, managing dependencies, and maintaining service continuity. Understanding of technical debt management and strategic architectural shifts.
Distributed Team Management
Experience managing teams across multiple geographies or time zones, with demonstrated ability to build cohesion, maintain communication, and support collaboration in remote or hybrid work environments.
Skills
Required
Technical Leadership
Ability to guide technical teams, make informed architectural decisions, and maintain credibility through demonstrated software engineering expertise and sound judgment in complex technical contexts.
People Management and Mentoring
Strong capability to develop talent, provide constructive feedback, create psychological safety, and build high-performing teams. Demonstrated skill in recognizing and cultivating individual strengths while fostering collaborative team culture.
Strategic Thinking and Planning
Capacity to think beyond immediate operational challenges, define long-term technical vision, translate strategy into actionable plans, and help teams understand how their work connects to broader organizational goals.
Communication and Stakeholder Management
Excellence in translating complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences, presenting to leadership, and building alignment across distributed teams. Skilled in remote communication and maintaining engagement across multiple locations.
Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
Ability to analyze complex technical and organizational challenges, evaluate trade-offs, make decisions under uncertainty, and drive teams toward solutions that balance multiple competing priorities.
System Thinking
Understanding of how platform services interconnect, anticipating downstream impacts of architectural decisions, and designing systems that scale gracefully as business demands evolve.
Preferred
SaaS Platform Experience
Nice to haveBackground specifically in SaaS companies managing multi-tenant platforms, subscription-based services, or business application software that requires handling millions of transactions and supporting diverse customer bases at scale.
Accounting or Fintech Domain Knowledge
Nice to haveFamiliarity with accounting software, financial transaction processing, compliance requirements, or other fintech domains. Understanding of the unique challenges in building reliable financial systems valuable but not required.
Data Migration and System Modernization
Nice to haveSpecific experience leading major data migration projects, deprecating legacy systems, or orchestrating complex infrastructure transformations with zero-downtime requirements.
Open Source and Community Contribution
Nice to haveBackground contributing to or maintaining open-source infrastructure projects, familiarity with community-driven development practices, and ability to evaluate and integrate modern platform engineering tooling.
Cost Optimization and Efficiency
Nice to haveDemonstrated success reducing infrastructure costs, optimizing resource utilization, or implementing FinOps practices to balance innovation investment with operational expenses at scale.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·NZD 140,000 – 200,000
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Hybrid Work Flexibility
Flexible hybrid work model with mix of on-site and remote work. Based ideally in Auckland or Wellington with office facilities, or fully remote work opportunities available for qualified candidates, supporting work-life balance and location flexibility.
Global Career Development
Opportunities to grow within a global cloud software platform company with presence across multiple countries, exposure to international product challenges, and potential for career advancement within Xero's leadership structure.
High-Impact Technical Work
Leadership role working on business-critical platform services that directly impact millions of small business customers globally. Opportunity to shape long-term architecture and make strategic decisions with meaningful business impact and technical significance.
Experienced Team Environment
Lead a team of eight highly skilled engineers with deep institutional knowledge of core systems. Work with long-standing technical experts who bring valuable perspective and institutional wisdom to platform architecture challenges.
Strategic Architectural Impact
Significant influence over long-term platform direction, with opportunity to guide team through major modernization initiative moving away from legacy database architecture. Ownership of strategic decisions that affect platform scalability for the next twenty years.
Distributed Team Collaboration
Manage geographically distributed team across Auckland, Wellington, and Melbourne with opportunity to build cross-location collaboration practices and support diverse perspectives in engineering decision-making.
Xero Company Culture
Join a company with strong cultural values including 'Go Bold', 'Go Together', and 'Go Further'. Work in an environment that values curiosity, care, psychological safety, and collaborative problem-solving.
Full posting
Original listing.
The role and it's impact
As Engineering Manager, you will guide a team of eight engineers who build and run the platform services that represent organisations in Xero. These are high-throughput services that sit behind much of what our customers do every day, so the work matters and the stakes are real. You will help the team grow, keep delivery steady and make space for the people who know these systems best to do their finest work.
Your first year is about taking stability to the next stage. After a period of recovery work, you will help the team set a path away from our legacy MyXero database and towards an architecture ready for the next twenty years of Xero. You will Go Bold by asking the questions that shape that path, while respecting the depth of knowledge already in the team.
The team and how they connect
You will join a platform team that looks after core services with very high usage and reach. Many of the engineers have deep knowledge of our systems, built up over many years, and they are spread across Auckland, Wellington and Melbourne. They Go Together through open conversation and shared ownership, whichever city they log in from.
Initially, you will focus on
Keeping our core systems steady, building on the recovery work the team has already done after recent outages
Planning how services move away from the legacy database
Shaping a long-term architecture path for our platform services
Getting to know the team, their expertise and how they work across three locations
Where and how you can work
We’re ideally looking for this role in Auckland or Wellington, and open to remote workers too. For those who are able to attend an office, we operate a hybrid model with a mix of time in on-site and time at home.
Here are some of the things we are looking for
You bring a software engineering background, with enough technical depth to ask thoughtful questions about how things are built.
Your time in a larger tech/SaaS company means you know what it takes to guide a team through scale.
You Go Bold by questioning the status quo with curiosity and care, while valuing the expertise of long-standing engineers.
You are comfortable around high-traffic, business-critical services, and a working knowledge of infrastructure tooling is a bonus.
You Go Further by turning a long-term architecture vision into a plan the team can rally behind.
Colleagues would say you Go Together naturally, growing people and building good working relationships across locations and time zones.
Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.
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.
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