# Head of Engineering - Making Payments
**Company:** [Xero](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/xero)
As Head of Engineering for Making Payments at Xero, you'll lead multiple engineering teams responsible for building the payments platform that enables small businesses globally to move money simply, securely, and reliably. This strategic leadership role combines technical architecture expertise with people leadership, requiring you to set engineering direction, shape product roadmaps, and build high-performing teams while maintaining architectural excellence and operational resilience. You'll drive a critical multi-year investment in Xero's Payments Platform as a technical anchor, balancing platform sustainability with delivery velocity while fostering an inclusive, high-trust engineering culture.
**Role:** Engineering Manager
**Seniority:** Director
**Locations:** AU: Melbourne: (260 Burwood Rd)
**Salary:** 180000–250000 AUD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xero/618a1b82-9b87-4942-8ef9-bdb81c992879)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/xero/head-of-engineering-making-payments
---
## Responsibilities

- Engineering Strategy & Roadmap Development: Define and execute the engineering strategy for Making Payments aligned with the Payments Platform and product priorities. Set clear technical direction, establish measurable objectives, and communicate long-term vision to engineering teams, product partners, and executive leadership. Balance customer value delivery, commercial outcomes, technical health, and engineering confidence through strategic planning and prioritization.
- Architectural Leadership & Technical Decision-Making: Provide architectural leadership for scalable, secure, and highly available payment systems operating at global scale. Make critical architectural decisions that influence speed to market, system resilience, provider flexibility, and operational efficiency. Maintain deep visibility into system health, engineering quality, technical debt, and architectural trade-offs while evaluating emerging technologies and practices.
- Multi-Team Leadership & Organization Building: Lead multiple engineering teams through Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, establishing clear accountability structures and decision-making frameworks. Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization with strong ownership culture. Hire, mentor, and develop engineering leadership talent while creating growth opportunities for individual contributors across all seniority levels.
- Operational Excellence & Reliability: Drive operational excellence through service ownership models, reliability improvements, observability infrastructure, and incident learning programs. Establish and maintain security practices, compliance standards, and operational procedures that meet regulatory requirements for financial services. Build incident response capabilities and cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and operational discipline.
- Product Collaboration & Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner closely with Product and Design teams to translate customer problems into technical solutions, connecting engineering choices to customer and business outcomes. Collaborate effectively across Risk, Operations, Security, and other functions to navigate complex organizational trade-offs. Communicate strategy, progress, risks, and technical trade-offs clearly to senior leaders and cross-functional partners.
- Investment Prioritization & Technical Debt Management: Balance investment allocation across product development, platform capabilities, resilience engineering, compliance enhancements, developer experience improvements, and technical debt reduction. Make data-driven decisions about engineering resource allocation that optimize for both near-term delivery and long-term platform sustainability.
- Delivery Leadership & Risk Management: Lead predictable delivery through clear priorities, effective planning cycles, and proactive risk management. Establish accountability mechanisms, track delivery confidence, and manage stakeholder expectations. Implement robust planning methodologies that enable consistent execution while maintaining flexibility to respond to market opportunities and technical challenges.
- AI-Forward Engineering Practices: Champion practical adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices that enhance code quality, development effectiveness, and customer outcomes. Evaluate and integrate AI tools into development workflows, testing strategies, and operational processes. Foster a culture of experimentation with AI while maintaining focus on measurable improvements to engineering velocity and product quality.
- Culture & Inclusive Leadership: Foster a high-trust, inclusive, and collaborative engineering culture characterized by strong ownership, clear decision-making processes, and bias toward action. Demonstrate high emotional intelligence, empathy, and resilience in navigating complex organizational dynamics. Build an environment where diverse perspectives are valued, conflict is navigated constructively, and all engineers can do their best work and grow.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in computer science, software engineering, mathematics, or equivalent field, or demonstrated equivalent knowledge through professional experience and continuous learning. Foundation in computer science fundamentals including algorithms, data structures, systems design, and software architecture principles."}

### technical

- {"name":"Software Architecture & Distributed Systems","description":"Deep technical expertise in designing and operating scalable distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native environments. Strong understanding of architectural patterns, system design trade-offs, consistency models, and approaches for building highly available systems at scale. Experience designing systems that balance performance, reliability, and maintainability."}
- {"name":"Payment Systems & Financial Services","description":"Experience architecting or operating payment systems, financial transaction processing, or regulated financial services platforms. Understanding of payment rails, settlement mechanics, compliance requirements (such as PCI-DSS, AML/KYC), and financial data security. Knowledge of payment infrastructure, provider integrations, and transaction reliability requirements is highly valuable."}
- {"name":"Reliability, Security & Compliance Engineering","description":"Demonstrated expertise in building secure, reliable systems with strong observability, monitoring, and incident response capabilities. Experience implementing security controls, managing compliance requirements in regulated domains, and establishing operational standards for production systems. Knowledge of reliability engineering practices, resilience patterns, and operational runbooks."}
- {"name":"Cloud-Native Platforms & Infrastructure","description":"Strong background operating cloud-native architectures and containerized systems on platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. Experience with Kubernetes, service meshes, infrastructure-as-code, and modern deployment practices. Understanding of cloud cost optimization, scalability patterns, and infrastructure automation."}
- {"name":"Developer Experience & Platform Engineering","description":"Experience building or leading developer platforms, internal tools, and frameworks that improve engineering productivity and consistency. Understanding of platform engineering principles, API design, developer onboarding processes, and tooling that enables teams to move faster while maintaining quality."}

### experience

- {"name":"Engineering Leadership of Multiple Teams","description":"Proven track record leading multiple engineering teams (8+ direct and indirect reports) through middle management layers. Demonstrated success setting engineering direction, establishing technical strategies, and maintaining accountability for delivery and quality across teams. Experience building leadership pipelines and developing Engineering Managers."}
- {"name":"Large-Scale System Operations","description":"Experience operating production systems serving millions of transactions or users with strict reliability and performance requirements. Track record of improving system reliability, reducing incident impact, and implementing operational best practices. Demonstrated ability to make architectural decisions that improved scalability, reduced latency, or enhanced resilience."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Technical Leadership","description":"Experience working effectively across Product, Design, Risk, Operations, Security, and Finance teams to navigate complex organizational trade-offs. Demonstrated ability to represent engineering perspectives in business discussions while understanding and balancing commercial priorities, customer needs, and technical health."}
- {"name":"Talent Development & Inclusive Leadership","description":"Proven ability to hire, mentor, and develop engineering talent at multiple levels, with examples of individuals progressing into leadership roles. Experience building inclusive teams and high-trust cultures with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. Track record of navigating conflict, providing effective feedback, and fostering psychological safety."}
- {"name":"Regulated or Complex Domain Experience","description":"Experience in financial services, payments, healthcare, or other complex or regulated domains. Understanding of domain-specific compliance requirements, risk management practices, and operational constraints that influence engineering decisions. Knowledge of how regulatory environment shapes product and technical strategy is valuable."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Strategic Technical Leadership","description":"Ability to set long-term technical direction, make architectural decisions aligned with business goals, and articulate complex technical choices to non-technical stakeholders. Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability and technical health."}
- {"name":"Team Leadership & Organizational Design","description":"Skill in building, structuring, and scaling engineering organizations, establishing clear reporting relationships, accountability mechanisms, and decision-making frameworks. Experience defining roles, career progression paths, and leadership development programs."}
- {"name":"Systems Thinking & Architecture","description":"Deep ability to understand complex systems holistically, model system interactions, anticipate failure modes, and design for resilience. Experience designing architectures that scale with business growth while maintaining performance and reliability."}
- {"name":"Product & Business Acumen","description":"Strong understanding of how engineering decisions influence customer value, product differentiation, time-to-market, and business outcomes. Ability to translate business requirements into technical strategy and connect technical investments to measurable outcomes."}
- {"name":"Operational Excellence & DevOps Culture","description":"Expertise building operational discipline, implementing observability, establishing incident response processes, and fostering ownership. Experience implementing SRE practices, runbooks, on-call rotations, and post-incident learning systems that drive continuous improvement."}
- {"name":"Stakeholder Communication & Influence","description":"Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to executive leadership, product teams, and across functions. Skill in influencing without authority, building consensus across competing priorities, and managing expectations through transparent communication."}
- {"name":"People Leadership & Emotional Intelligence","description":"High emotional intelligence, empathy, and resilience in navigating complex interpersonal dynamics. Ability to provide constructive feedback, navigate conflict, build trust, and create psychological safety. Demonstrated inclusive leadership that values diverse perspectives and backgrounds."}
- {"name":"Delivery & Execution","description":"Track record of delivering consistently against commitments while managing risk and maintaining quality. Experience establishing planning processes, managing dependencies, tracking progress, and adjusting plans based on new information or obstacles."}

### preferred

- {"name":"AI-Enabled Engineering Practices","description":"Experience adopting AI and machine learning tools into development workflows, testing, code review, and operational processes. Understanding of generative AI capabilities and limitations in software engineering. Demonstrated thought leadership in championing AI adoption responsibly within engineering teams."}
- {"name":"Scaled SaaS & Multi-Tenant Platforms","description":"Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms serving global customers with diverse regulatory requirements. Understanding of deployment strategies, data isolation, compliance considerations, and operational complexity of scaled SaaS infrastructure."}
- {"name":"FinTech & Regulatory Compliance","description":"Background in financial technology, payments infrastructure, or regulated industries. Knowledge of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, AML/KYC), regulatory risk management, and audit processes. Experience working with compliance and risk teams to embed controls into engineering processes."}
- {"name":"Open Source & Developer Community","description":"Active contribution to open source projects, speaking at engineering conferences, or building developer communities. Track record of thought leadership that attracts engineering talent and establishes credibility within the broader engineering community."}
- {"name":"Organizational Change & Scaling","description":"Experience scaling engineering organizations through phases of growth, managing organizational restructuring, and navigating cultural evolution. Demonstrated ability to adapt leadership approaches as organizations grow and business priorities evolve."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing deployments, scaling, and resilience of cloud-native payment systems. Experience with Kubernetes operators, service meshes, and advanced deployment strategies."}
- {"name":"AWS/GCP/Azure","description":"Major cloud platforms with services like ECS, Lambda, managed databases, and networking primitives. Experience provisioning infrastructure, cost management, and leveraging managed services for financial workloads."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Pipelines","description":"Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar for automated testing, building, and deployment. Experience designing pipelines that ensure code quality and enable rapid, safe releases."}
- {"name":"Observability & Monitoring","description":"Datadog, Prometheus, ELK Stack, or similar tools for metrics collection, logging, and distributed tracing. Experience building comprehensive observability for complex payment systems and incident response."}
- {"name":"Service Meshes","description":"Istio, Linkerd, or similar technologies for managing service-to-service communication, traffic management, and observability in microservices environments. Experience implementing circuit breakers, retries, and traffic policies."}

### others

- {"name":"Payment Processing APIs & Integrations","description":"Experience integrating with payment processors, clearing networks, and financial infrastructure providers. Understanding of APIs like Stripe, PayPal, banking rail APIs, and settlement mechanisms."}
- {"name":"Security & Cryptography","description":"Knowledge of encryption, TLS/SSL, tokenization, secure API design, and authentication/authorization patterns. Understanding of security controls in payment systems, PCI compliance requirements, and secure data handling."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code","description":"Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi experience for managing infrastructure through code. Ability to version, review, and deploy infrastructure changes with confidence and consistency."}
- {"name":"AI-Enabled Development Tools","description":"Familiarity with GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or similar AI-assisted development tools. Experience evaluating AI tools for code generation, testing, and operational tasks."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for transactional systems. Experience with schema design, query optimization, replication, and high-availability configurations essential for payment systems."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory caching and session management for improving performance and enabling real-time features. Experience with Redis clustering, persistence models, and operational considerations."}
- {"name":"Event Streaming Platforms","description":"Kafka or similar event streaming systems for real-time data pipelines, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous processing patterns in distributed payment systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"Java","description":"Primary backend language commonly used in financial services and scalable platform systems. Experience with Java 11+, async programming models, and performance optimization in production systems."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Used for tooling, data analysis, and infrastructure automation. Experience with Python for platform engineering, testing frameworks, and operational scripts."}
- {"name":"JavaScript/TypeScript","description":"Used across full-stack development, frontend applications, and backend services. Strong TypeScript typing practices for reliability and maintainability at scale."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Primary framework for building microservices and cloud-native applications in Java. Experience building scalable services with Spring Boot, managing dependencies, and implementing enterprise patterns."}
- {"name":"Microservices Architecture","description":"Distributed service design patterns, inter-service communication, resilience patterns like circuit breakers and timeouts, and API design for service-oriented architecture."}
- {"name":"React or Similar Frontend Frameworks","description":"Modern frontend framework experience for building user interfaces and payment experiences. Understanding of component architecture, state management, and performance optimization."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 0
- **min:** 0
- **currency:** 
- **stockOptions:** false

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
## **About the Role**

Xero reimagined accounting software. Now, we’re reimagining the flow of money itself.

We’re making a critical, multi-year investment in our Payments Platform: the foundation for how small businesses move money across Xero globally. The Making Payments team builds products and capabilities that help businesses pay bills and move money simply, securely, and reliably.

As Head of Engineering, you will lead multiple teams responsible for product experiences and platform capabilities. You will set engineering direction, shape the roadmap with Product and Design, and create the conditions for high-quality customer and business outcomes.

This role combines strategic leadership, technical judgement, product sense, and people leadership. You will be a technical anchor for the organisation, maintaining a clear view of architecture, reliability, engineering quality, and long-term sustainability while enabling teams to deliver at pace.

You will help define how Making Payments evolves as a product and engineering organisation. This includes shaping the architecture for payments, balancing platform investment with product delivery, strengthening operational excellence, and building a high-performing leadership and engineering team.

As an engineering leader at Xero, you will bring high EQ, sound judgement, empathy, resilience, and the ability to build trust. You will lead our vision and values, creating an inclusive environment where people can do their best work and grow.

## **What You’ll Do**

* Set the engineering strategy and roadmap for Making Payments, aligned to Payments Platform and product priorities.
* Partner with Product and Design to understand customer problems and balance customer value, commercial outcomes, technical health, and delivery confidence.
* Provide architectural leadership for scalable, secure, highly available payment systems, maintaining a clear view of system health, engineering quality, technical debt, and trade-offs.
* Lead predictable delivery through clear priorities, effective planning, proactive risk management, accountability, and stakeholder alignment.
* Build operational excellence through service ownership, reliability, observability, incident learning, security, and continuous improvement.
* Balance investment across product development, platform capabilities, resilience, compliance, developer experience, and technical debt.
* Hire and develop Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders while creating opportunities for engineers to grow.
* Foster a high-trust, inclusive, collaborative culture with strong ownership, clear decisions, and a bias toward action.
* Be an AI-forward engineering leader, championing practical adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices that improve quality, effectiveness, and customer outcomes. Communicate strategy, progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to senior leaders and partners.

## **What We’re Looking For**

* Experience leading multiple engineering teams through Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, with a track record of setting direction and accountability.
* Deep technical judgement across software architecture, distributed systems, cloud-native environments, reliability, security, and scale.
* Strong product sense and strategic planning, with the ability to connect engineering choices to customer and business outcomes.
* A track record of operating high-quality production systems and improving reliability, service ownership, and operational effectiveness.
* Sound judgement in complex trade-offs, with experience partnering across Product, Design, Risk, Operations, Security, and other functions.
* Demonstrated ability to grow talent and leaders, build an inclusive high-trust culture, navigate conflict, and champion AI adoption. Experience in payments, financial services, or another complex or regulated domain is valuable.

## **Why Join Us**

* Shape the future of money movement at Xero through a strategically important Payments Platform organisation.
* Lead both product and platform engineering as Making Payments grows from early investment into a globally scaled capability.
* Work on meaningful problems across money movement, payment experiences, reliability, and customer value.
* Make foundational architectural decisions that improve speed to market, resilience, and provider flexibility.
* Build and grow a high-performing engineering organisation and its leadership culture.
* Have visible impact through a significant roadmap and broad organisational scope.

## **Where and How You Can Work**

This is a Melbourne-based role. Xero offers a hybrid working environment with a mix of office-based collaboration and remote flexibility. We use boost days to bring teams together in our modern office spaces to foster connection, alignment, and creativity.