Lead Engineer- Syft
Lead Engineer · Lead · Full Time
Opens Xero's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Lead Engineer at Xero's Syft team, responsible for designing and delivering scalable reporting and insights software while mentoring engineers and driving architectural excellence. This hands-on technical leadership role combines hands-on development with strategic oversight of complex distributed systems serving thousands of customers globally. You'll shape product direction, improve operational visibility, and foster a culture of ownership and continuous learning within a collaborative cross-functional engineering environment.
Responsibilities
- Technical Leadership & Architectural Direction: Set the technical direction for the Syft UK pod, breaking down organizational silos and establishing engineering standards that align with company-wide architectural principles. Drive multi-year product and platform goals through data-driven decision-making and strategic simplification of complex systems.
- Hands-On Development & Code Leadership: Write production code regularly while leading the team's technical efforts on high-impact projects including Budgets API, Reporting integration, Benchmarking rebuild, and Syft-X API resilience improvements. Model engineering excellence through your own work and code quality standards.
- Team Mentoring & Growth: Coach and mentor engineers to grow their technical capabilities, improve their development practices, and tackle open-ended architectural challenges. Foster a collaborative and safe working environment that encourages ownership, experimentation, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
- Operational Excellence & Incident Management: Lead incident response efforts, resolve failure patterns, and implement quality testing strategies to enhance system resilience. Strengthen operational visibility, improve deployment safety, and reduce dependency on individuals for critical production knowledge.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, designers, and internal stakeholders to align technical designs with business objectives. Build alignment across distributed teams and communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Process Improvement & Safe Changes: Implement safer, smaller change methodologies and improve how the team works across design, delivery, deployment, and support. Establish best practices for code review, testing, monitoring, and continuous deployment to maximize velocity while maintaining quality.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Distributed Systems Design
Proven expertise designing and implementing secure, scalable distributed systems that handle high throughput and complex data flows. Experience building event-driven architectures, managing eventual consistency, and ensuring fault tolerance at scale.
Node.js & JavaScript Ecosystem
Strong proficiency with Node.js, modern JavaScript/TypeScript, and the associated ecosystem. Experience with async patterns, performance optimization, and building production-grade backend services that serve millions of requests.
AWS Cloud Platform
Deep expertise with AWS services including EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and related infrastructure. Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), serverless architectures, and optimizing cloud costs while maintaining security and reliability.
Production Systems Management
Extensive experience managing software at scale in production environments. Proficiency with monitoring, observability, logging, alerting, and incident response. Experience reducing technical debt, improving deployment processes, and maintaining system reliability.
API Design & Database Architecture
Expertise designing RESTful and event-driven APIs, schema design, query optimization, and database performance tuning. Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases and selecting appropriate data storage solutions for different use cases.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals including algorithms, data structures, and system design principles.
Experience
Senior Engineering Experience
8-12+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2-3 years in senior or lead engineering roles. Proven track record of designing systems that scale, shipping major features, and handling complex technical projects.
Mentoring & Team Leadership
Demonstrated experience coaching, mentoring, and developing other engineers. Track record of helping teammates grow technically and professionally, fostering ownership culture, and improving team capability.
Incident Management & Resilience
Experience leading incident response efforts, conducting postmortems, implementing corrective actions, and building operational excellence practices. Background in improving system reliability and reducing production incidents.
FinTech or SaaS Product Experience
Experience building products or platforms in the fintech, accounting software, or enterprise SaaS space is highly valuable. Understanding regulatory requirements, data security, and multi-tenant architecture would be advantageous.
Skills
Required
System Design & Architecture
Ability to design complex, scalable systems with consideration for performance, security, maintainability, and operational requirements. Experience with architectural patterns like microservices, event sourcing, or CQRS.
Technical Communication
Strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, product managers, and executives. Skill in writing technical design documents, RFCs, and architectural decision records.
Mentoring & Leadership
Proven ability to mentor junior and mid-level engineers, provide constructive feedback, and help them develop technical and professional skills. Ability to lead through influence and create psychological safety.
Production Operations
Deep understanding of production systems, observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Experience with deployment strategies, chaos engineering, and building operational resilience.
Problem-Solving & Analysis
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with data-driven decision making. Ability to break down complex problems, identify root causes, and implement sustainable solutions.
Preferred
Cloud Architecture Certification
Nice to haveAWS Solutions Architect or similar cloud certification demonstrating deep platform knowledge and best practices for cloud-native application design.
Open Source Contributions
Nice to haveActive contributions to open source projects, particularly in Node.js, infrastructure, or developer tools ecosystems. Demonstrates passion for continuous learning and community engagement.
Cross-Team Collaboration
Nice to haveExperience working across multiple teams or organizations to align on technical strategy. Ability to balance local team needs with broader organizational objectives.
Scaling Experience
Nice to haveHands-on experience scaling systems from early-stage to millions of users. Understanding of how to balance speed of development with infrastructure constraints and cost management.
Agile & Modern Development Practices
Nice to haveFamiliarity with agile methodologies, continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), test-driven development, pair programming, and other modern software development practices.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·GBP 130,000 – 160,000
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Flexible Remote Work
Fully remote working environment with the flexibility to work hybrid from modern office spaces if preferred. Designated in-office collaboration days to connect with colleagues and foster team culture.
Professional Development
Investment in continuous learning through conferences, training programs, and professional development opportunities. Access to platforms for expanding technical knowledge and staying current with industry trends.
Collaborative Culture
Work in a cross-functional engineering environment that values ownership, experimentation, feedback, and psychological safety. Culture that encourages knowledge sharing and welcomes diverse perspectives.
Impact & Influence
Direct influence on product direction and technical strategy. Opportunity to shape the technical roadmap across a significant product area serving thousands of customers globally.
Leadership Opportunities
Hands-on technical leadership role with mentoring responsibilities. Opportunity to build and scale engineering teams while maintaining hands-on involvement in architecture and development.
Competitive Compensation Package
Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, retirement plans, and stock options aligned with company performance. Compensation benchmarked against market rates for senior engineering talent.
Process
Interview steps.
- 01
Initial Screening Conversation
A conversation with a Xero recruiter to discuss your background, career trajectory, and alignment with the Lead Engineer role. Preparation tip: Be ready to discuss your experience with distributed systems, mentoring others, and scaling production systems.
- 02
Technical Architecture Discussion
Conversation with senior engineers focused on your approach to system design, scalability challenges, and architectural decision-making. Expect questions about designing APIs, handling failures, and improving system resilience. Bring specific examples from your past work.
- 03
Leadership & Mentoring Assessment
Discussion with current team leads or hiring manager about your leadership philosophy, mentoring approach, and how you foster team growth. Share examples of how you've developed junior engineers and improved team processes.
- 04
Hands-On Technical Challenge
A practical coding exercise or system design problem relevant to backend services, APIs, or distributed systems. This evaluates your current technical proficiency and problem-solving approach. You may code in your language of choice.
- 05
Product & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Conversation with product or cross-functional stakeholders about working with non-technical teams, translating requirements into technical solutions, and aligning technical decisions with business goals.
- 06
Team & Culture Fit
Final conversation often with the broader team or engineering leadership to assess cultural fit, collaboration style, and alignment with Xero's engineering values around ownership and continuous learning.
Full posting
Original listing.
The role
You will collaborate with peers across Xero to create and deliver software to our customers. By modelling engineering excellence, you will support your team to grow their technical capability, improve development practices, and tackle open-ended architectural challenges.
Your work will directly shape the technical direction of the product group, breaking down silos and driving multi-year product or platform goals. Through data-driven decisions and smart simplification of complex systems, you will help solve customer problems effectively and release value early.
The team
This cross-functional engineering team focuses on building and managing software that solves complex problems at scale. Working in a collaborative and safe environment, team members coordinate closely to align technical designs with broader architectural standards. Together, they foster a culture of ownership, experimentation, and feedback to deliver high-quality outcomes.
The team is currently working on
The Syft UK pod is working on high-impact reporting and insights engineering across Xero. Current work includes Budgets API and Reporting integration, the Benchmarking rebuild, and resilience improvements to the Syft-X API as demand grows from both customer-facing experiences and internal consumers.
As a Lead Engineer, you’ll be a hands-on technical leader: setting direction, supporting engineers to deliver well, and improving how the team works across design, delivery, deployment and support. You’ll help us build smaller, safer changes, strengthen operational visibility, and reduce dependency on a small number of people for critical knowledge and production work
Where and how you can work
This role offers a remote working environment designed to support collaboration and balance. If you prefer you can work hybrid from one of our modern office spaces, designated in-office boost days to connect with other teams in person.
Here are some of the things we are looking for
You bring expertise in designing secure, scalable distributed systems and managing software at scale with proficiency in our core tech stack, Node js, AWS.
A background in coaching and mentoring engineers, helping them grow their technical capabilities, is essential.
You possess strong communication skills, with the ability to navigate complex technical ideas and build alignment.
Your growth mindset drives a passion for continuous learning, experimentation, and sharing technical knowledge.
An ability to lead incident responses, resolve failure patterns, and guide quality testing strategies will be highly valued.
You offer a collaborative approach to problem-solving, welcoming diverse perspectives and encouraging a healthy team culture.
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.
Redirects to Xero's application page.
Other roles
More at Xero.
Senior Security Engineer - Cloud Platform
Senior
Engineering Manager
Manager
Senior Search Engineer
Senior
Engineering Manager - Data
Manager
Senior Engineer
Senior