# Senior Search Engineer
**Company:** [Xero](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/xero)
Xero is seeking a Senior Search Engineer to maintain and evolve one of the Southern Hemisphere's largest search clusters, managing hundreds of millions of searchable documents at 99.9% uptime while contributing to a strategic platform rebuild. This role offers genuine technical ownership across search infrastructure, platform architecture, and large-scale system design, requiring strong production search experience and high-quality engineering fundamentals.
**Role:** Senior Search Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** AU: Melbourne: (260 Burwood Rd)
**Salary:** 140000–190000 NZD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xero/bec9946f-d4fc-4d66-8cda-39aa93dba6dc)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/xero/senior-search-engineer
---
## Responsibilities

- Search Infrastructure Ownership: Maintain and evolve Xero's large-scale search cluster processing hundreds of millions of documents at global scale, ensuring 99.9% uptime SLA across production systems serving millions of users worldwide.
- Platform Rebuild Leadership: Contribute to a multi-year strategic search platform rebuild project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, driving architectural decisions and implementation of next-generation search capabilities.
- Code Quality & Technical Review: Raise, review, and provide technical feedback on pull requests with a high-quality mindset; establish and maintain engineering standards across the search team's codebase.
- Project Leadership & Delivery: Lead and own end-to-end project delivery across search-specific and generalist engineering work, coordinating with Product Management and the Catalyst Platform team on cross-service changes and releases.
- Ingestion Pipeline Collaboration: Partner with the ODL team on designing and optimizing the ingestion pipeline for the new search platform, ensuring efficient document processing and indexing at scale.
- Capability Development: Contribute to future capability development in data and AI-adjacent search functionality, exploring emerging technologies and competitive search features.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work collaboratively with distributed engineering, product, and infrastructure teams across Australia and New Zealand, contributing to technical strategy and architectural decisions.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating strong computer science fundamentals."}

### technical

- {"name":"Production Search Systems Experience","description":"Deep expertise building, maintaining, and scaling production search systems in high-traffic environments with millions of queries and documents."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Strong understanding of distributed systems design, cluster management, and large-scale data processing patterns at the infrastructure level."}
- {"name":"Search Engine Technologies","description":"Hands-on experience with search engine platforms such as Elasticsearch, Solr, or equivalent; proficiency with search indexing, query optimization, and relevance tuning."}
- {"name":"Backend Engineering Fundamentals","description":"Solid understanding of core software engineering principles including system design, databases, APIs, and distributed computing concepts."}
- {"name":"Performance Optimization & Monitoring","description":"Experience optimizing query performance, implementing observability solutions, and debugging complex distributed system issues in production environments."}

### experience

- {"name":"Search Infrastructure Engineering","description":"5+ years of professional experience in search engineering, search platform development, or information retrieval systems, with exposure to multi-regional or global-scale deployments."}
- {"name":"Large-Scale System Maintenance","description":"Proven track record maintaining and evolving complex production systems with high uptime requirements, managing infrastructure at scale."}
- {"name":"Cloud Platform Experience","description":"Experience working with cloud infrastructure or SaaS platforms, understanding deployment patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and managed services."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Search Engine Architecture","description":"Expert-level knowledge of search engine architecture, indexing strategies, query processing, and ranking algorithms."}
- {"name":"Software Engineering Excellence","description":"Strong software engineering practices including code quality standards, testing strategies, design patterns, and architectural decision-making."}
- {"name":"System Design at Scale","description":"Ability to design systems that handle hundreds of millions of documents, optimize for performance and reliability, and architect multi-region deployments."}
- {"name":"Collaborative Problem-Solving","description":"Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, particularly in distributed team environments across multiple regions."}
- {"name":"Production Operations","description":"Experience with production monitoring, incident response, observability, and maintaining high-availability systems."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Data Engineering & Pipeline Development","description":"Familiarity with data ingestion pipelines, ETL processes, and data platform architecture relevant to search indexing workflows."}
- {"name":"Machine Learning Integration","description":"Experience with AI/ML tooling and integrating machine learning models into search ranking, relevance, or recommendation systems."}
- {"name":"Catalyst Platform & Microservices","description":"Knowledge of microservices architecture, coordinated deployments, and platform engineering approaches used in large technology organizations."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps","description":"Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and cloud platform services."}
- {"name":"Open Source Search Contributions","description":"Active contributions to open-source search projects or documentation demonstrating thought leadership in the search engineering community."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Monitoring & Observability Tools","description":"Proficiency with production monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to maintain 99.9% uptime SLAs."}
- {"name":"Version Control & CI/CD","description":"Strong experience with Git, pull request workflows, and continuous integration/deployment pipelines."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code","description":"Experience with IaC tools for managing cloud infrastructure and search cluster deployments across regions."}

### others

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Understanding of consistency models, replication strategies, and fault tolerance in large-scale distributed search systems."}
- {"name":"Query Optimization & Relevance Tuning","description":"Expertise in optimizing search query performance, relevance scoring, and improving search user experience at scale."}
- {"name":"Ingestion Pipeline Architecture","description":"Knowledge of building and optimizing high-throughput document ingestion pipelines for real-time and batch indexing scenarios."}

### databases

- {"name":"Distributed Search Clusters","description":"Management and optimization of large-scale search clusters handling hundreds of millions of documents with high availability requirements."}
- {"name":"Cloud Data Platforms","description":"Experience with cloud-based data storage and processing systems relevant to search indexing and analytics workflows."}

### languages

- {"name":"Java","description":"Primary language for search platform development and backend services at enterprise scale."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Useful for data processing, ETL pipelines, and analytics related to search indexing and performance optimization."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Distributed search and analytics engine for building scalable search infrastructure and handling large document volumes."}
- {"name":"Solr","description":"Alternative enterprise search platform for building high-performance search systems and managing search clusters at scale."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Flexible Work Arrangements","description":"Genuine flexibility in day-to-day work location with options to work from home or office. Team alignment gatherings approximately every six months in Melbourne for in-person collaboration and relationship building."}
- {"name":"Boost Days Program","description":"Optional office collaboration days allowing you to work from Xero locations and connect with the broader Xero community when it suits your schedule and work style."}
- {"name":"Geographic Work Options","description":"Choice to work from Australia or New Zealand, accommodating distributed team preferences and lifestyle choices across the ANZ region."}
- {"name":"High-Impact Technical Ownership","description":"Significant technical ownership of critical infrastructure serving millions of users, with real influence on platform strategy and architectural decisions."}
- {"name":"Learning & Development Opportunities","description":"Exposure to cutting-edge search technologies, AI/ML tooling, and large-scale system design through participation in strategic platform rebuild initiatives."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 190000
- **min:** 140000
- **currency:** NZD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Screening","description":"Phone or video screening with a recruiter to discuss your background, search engineering experience, and interest in the role at Xero."}
- {"name":"Technical Assessment","description":"In-depth technical discussion focused on your experience with search systems, distributed architecture challenges, and approaches to maintaining high-availability production infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Search Engineering Deep Dive","description":"Detailed conversation with members of the Search team about specific projects, technical decision-making, and examples of your work with large-scale search platforms."}
- {"name":"System Design Interview","description":"Collaborative session designing a search system at scale, discussing trade-offs, architectural patterns, and how you approach complex distributed systems challenges."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Discussion","description":"Meeting with product management, platform engineering, or infrastructure team members to assess collaboration style and cross-functional alignment."}
- {"name":"Leadership & Culture Fit","description":"Final conversation addressing your approach to code quality, technical leadership, and working effectively within a distributed, collaborative team environment."}

## Full description
**The role / impact**

This is a role for a search specialist who wants to work at genuine scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere; part of an entire vertical stack delivered to customers. The work is both meaningful and technically stretching: keeping hundreds of millions of searchable documents at global scale running at 99.9% uptime, while contributing to a significant platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero's growth.

Beyond the day-to-day, this role is about real ownership. You will contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review pull requests, and lead projects. If you are someone who cares about quality and gets energised by hard problems at scale, this is a place where your work will genuinely matter.

**The team & how they connect**

The Search team is a small, tight-knit group spread across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand. You will partner closely with a team who are building the ingestion layer for our platform, a dedicated Product Manager, and the Catalyst Platform team who coordinate changes and releases across services. The team brings a high-quality mindset to everything they do, and solves challenging technical problems together.

**The team is currently working on**

* A large-scale search platform rebuild - a multi-year project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, using a search cluster that processes that processes hundreds of millions of documents at global scale
* Maintaining and evolving the cluster to keep systems running at 99.9% uptime
* Collaborating with the ODL team on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform
* Future capability development in data and AI-adjacent search, as the platform continues to evolve

**Where and how you can work**

This role can be based in Australia or NZ. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day. The team comes together in Melbourne approximately every six months - a chance to connect, align, and spend time in person with colleagues across regions. Xero also offers boost days, giving you the option to work from the office and collaborate with the broader Xero community when it suits you.

**Here are some of the things we are looking for**

* You bring strong search engineering experience and know what it takes to build, maintain and scale search systems in a production environment
* Solid software engineering and development fundamentals are part of your toolkit, and you are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work
* Quality comes first for you - you hold a high bar for the code you write and review, and care about doing things properly
* Working collaboratively with others comes naturally to you, whether that is with engineering, product or infrastructure teams across a distributed environment
* Bonus points if you have exposure to data or AI tooling, though this is not a requirement to be considered