Scale Engineer

Senior Software Engineer, AI Enablement

Senior Software Engineer · Senior · Full Time

AU: Sydney (45 Clarence St)3w ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Join Xero's AI Enablement team as a Senior Software Engineer to design and build internal platforms, tools, and best practices that empower engineers across the organization to work effectively with AI. Working with C#, .NET, AWS, and emerging AI technologies, you'll own projects end-to-end from experimentation through production, collaborate with industry partners like AWS and Microsoft on cutting-edge technology, and shape the technical direction of an internal skills marketplace serving hundreds of engineers. This role requires deep production discipline, strong communication skills, and curiosity about AI-native development—offering real influence over Xero's AI engineering strategy.

Responsibilities

  • End-to-End Platform Ownership: Own the complete lifecycle of AI enablement tools and platforms from early-stage experimentation through production deployment, including architecture decisions, implementation, and long-term maintenance. Take full responsibility for reliability and performance once the platform scales across the engineering organization.
  • Internal Skills Marketplace Development: Design and build an internal marketplace that enables engineers to discover, share, and leverage AI-native agent skills and tools across Xero's product engineering teams. Establish discoverability, governance, and quality standards for shared AI components.
  • Production Excellence & Operational Readiness: Establish production discipline by writing comprehensive runbooks, designing monitoring strategies, implementing alerting systems, and planning rollback procedures before any system reaches production. Ensure reliability and observability for critical internal infrastructure that hundreds of engineers depend on daily.
  • AI Distribution Platform Engineering: Build and maintain a distribution platform that enables standardized deployment, versioning, and management of AI tools and frameworks across the engineering organization. Ensure seamless integration with development workflows and infrastructure.
  • Strategic Vendor Collaboration: Work directly with AWS, Microsoft, and GitHub on early-access and pre-release technology not yet available to the public. Provide feedback, validate implementation approaches, and integrate emerging capabilities into Xero's AI strategy before general availability.
  • Best Practice Development & Guidance: Create and maintain best practices documentation, guidance, and training materials for authoring agent skills, designing AI-native workflows, and implementing remediation tasks. Build organizational knowledge to accelerate AI adoption across engineering teams.
  • Cross-Team Communication & Alignment: Communicate technical decisions clearly to stakeholders, present roadmap items to product managers and leadership, and bring teams along with proposed ideas. Drive consensus on technical direction through thoughtful engagement and stakeholder management.
  • Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Provide technical guidance to team members on AI development patterns, architectural approaches, and engineering best practices. Help shape the team's growth and capability as Xero's AI engineering practice matures.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • C# & .NET Framework

    Hands-on production experience building and maintaining C# applications on the .NET framework, including async patterns, dependency injection, and performance optimization. This is Xero's primary development platform for core systems.

  • AWS Cloud Services

    Practical experience with AWS services including Lambda, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and API Gateway. Ability to design scalable, reliable cloud-native architectures and implement infrastructure-as-code patterns.

  • AI & Large Language Models

    Practical understanding of large language models, prompt engineering, and AI-native development patterns. Experience working with APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar AI service providers, and understanding of agentic workflows.

  • Python & TypeScript

    Functional programming competency in Python and TypeScript for AI tooling, scripting, and supporting infrastructure. While not primary stack, these languages are essential for modern AI tooling at Xero.

  • Production Systems Design

    Expertise in designing and building reliable production systems with comprehensive monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident response capabilities. Deep understanding of runbook creation, chaos engineering principles, and disaster recovery planning.

  • API & Platform Design

    Experience designing clean, well-documented APIs and developer platforms. Understanding of API versioning, backward compatibility, and building systems that scale to hundreds of internal users.

  • Distributed Systems & Deployment

    Understanding of distributed system principles, containerization patterns, deployment automation, and CI/CD pipelines. Experience deploying and operating systems across multiple environments.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    Formal education in computer science, software engineering, or related discipline providing strong foundational knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and system design. Not strictly required if substantial professional experience demonstrates equivalent expertise.

Experience

  • 7+ Years of Professional Software Engineering

    Demonstrated track record of building and shipping production software systems at scale. This role requires maturity in architectural thinking, technical decision-making, and operating systems in live environments.

  • Internal Tools & Platform Development

    Direct experience building internal tools, developer platforms, or infrastructure that other engineers genuinely relied on for their daily work. Understanding of internal user needs, operational excellence, and adoption strategies for internal products.

  • AI or Machine Learning Engineering Experience

    Prior experience integrating AI capabilities into production systems, working with machine learning models, or building AI-native tools. This could include prompt engineering, agents, or AI orchestration patterns in professional settings.

  • Cloud-Native Development

    Proven experience building and operating cloud-native applications, particularly on AWS. Familiarity with serverless architectures, containerized deployments, and cloud infrastructure management.

Skills

Required

  • C# Development

    Strong proficiency in C# with production experience in async/await patterns, LINQ, dependency injection, and enterprise application architecture.

  • .NET Framework Architecture

    Deep understanding of .NET Framework or .NET Core architecture, including application design, performance tuning, and integration with cloud services.

  • AWS Cloud Platform

    Hands-on expertise with AWS services, infrastructure design, and operational best practices. Ability to evaluate trade-offs between different AWS services for specific use cases.

  • Large Language Model Integration

    Experience integrating LLMs into applications, including prompt design, response parsing, and handling model behavior at scale.

  • Software Architecture & System Design

    Ability to design scalable, maintainable systems with clear abstractions, separation of concerns, and consideration for long-term operational requirements.

  • Production Operations & Monitoring

    Expertise in observability, logging, distributed tracing, alerting configuration, and incident response. Strong operational mindset applied before code ships.

  • Technical Communication

    Ability to articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences, document architectural decisions, and present complex ideas clearly to stakeholders and peers.

Preferred

  • Python Programming

    Nice to have

    Familiarity with Python for scripting, data processing, and AI tooling. This accelerates work with AI libraries and supporting infrastructure.

  • TypeScript & Modern Frontend

    Nice to have

    Experience with TypeScript and modern JavaScript frameworks for building developer tools, dashboards, or internal UIs that support platform adoption.

  • Agent & Agentic Workflows

    Nice to have

    Understanding of autonomous agent design patterns, multi-step reasoning, tool use, and agentic frameworks like LangChain or AutoGPT-style approaches.

  • Infrastructure as Code

    Nice to have

    Experience with IaC tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or CDK for repeatable infrastructure provisioning and environment management.

  • API Gateway & Service Mesh

    Nice to have

    Experience building or operating API gateways, service meshes, or similar distributed systems infrastructure for managing internal tool distribution.

  • Developer Experience & DevTools

    Nice to have

    Background in building tools explicitly designed for developer productivity, including SDKs, CLIs, frameworks, or internal developer platforms.

  • Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

    Nice to have

    Experience with Kubernetes deployments, container management, and orchestration patterns for scaling internal services.

  • Git & Advanced Version Control

    Nice to have

    Deep familiarity with Git workflows, branching strategies, and version control patterns for managing complex distributed development.

Tech stack

Languages

C#PythonTypeScript

Frameworks

.NET Framework / .NET CoreASP.NET CoreLangChainFastAPIReact or Vue.js

Databases

SQL ServerPostgreSQLDynamoDBRedis

Tools

AWS Console & CLIGit & GitHubCloudWatchDataDog or New RelicTerraform or AWS CDKDocker & Container RegistryKubernetesCI/CD Pipeline Tools

Other

OpenAI APIAnthropic Claude APIMicrosoft Copilot & GitHub CopilotPrompt Engineering & Prompt ManagementObservability & TracingIncident Management & Runbook Development

Full posting

Original listing.

Senior Software Engineer, AI Enablement

The role & impact

You'll join a small team that builds the tools, platforms and best practices helping engineers across Xero work with AI. Rather than shipping something once and moving on, you'll own it end to end from early experimentation through to production, including the run books, monitoring and rollback thinking that keep it reliable once real engineers depend on it day to day.

This is a role with real influence. You'll help shape the technical direction of an internal skills marketplace and AI distribution platform used across the wider engineering organisation, work directly with vendors like AWS, Microsoft and GitHub on technology that isn't public yet, and help guide and challenge a team that's still early in its AI journey.

The team & how they connect

The AI Enablement team sits within Engineering Experience and focuses on helping product engineering teams work faster and better with AI through platforms, tooling and practical guidance rather than just standard tooling. It's a close-knit team, spread across Melbourne, Sydney and the Sunshine Coast, with a product manager based in Wellington, who stay connected through regular syncs and a genuinely collaborative way of working despite the distance.

Initially, you will focus on

  • Our current stack is C#, .NET and AWS, with Python and TypeScript picked up along the way for AI tooling

  • Building an internal skills marketplace and a distribution platform for AI tools used across Xero's engineering org

  • Developing guidance and best practice for authoring agent skills, including agents for remediation tasks

  • Collaborating directly with AWS, Microsoft and GitHub on early-access technology not yet available in market

Where and how you can work

You can be based anywhere in Australia, and we're also open to candidates based in New Zealand. The team works in a hybrid way and is used to connecting across time zones, with regular in person boost days to come together, plan and collaborate as a team.

Here are some of the things we're looking for, for this role

  • You bring hands-on software engineering experience, ideally with C#, .NET and AWS — if your background is elsewhere, we're still keen to talk, as good engineers pick up new stacks quickly

  • You've built internal tools or platforms that other engineers genuinely relied on

  • Production discipline matters to you: You write runbooks, set up monitoring and think through rollback before anything goes live

  • You communicate clearly and know how to bring people along with an idea, not just ship code quietly in the background

  • You're curious about coding agents and AI-native tools, and you keep an eye on where AI engineering is heading

  • You can challenge a decision directly and respectfully, and you learn new things in a structured, quality-focused way

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.

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