# Senior Software Engineer - Payments Platform
**Company:** [Xero](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/xero)
Senior Software Engineer - Payments Platform at Xero, based in Vancouver. This role focuses on building and scaling a critical payments platform that enables small businesses to collect and pay money reliably and securely. You'll own end-to-end initiatives in payment orchestration, provider integrations, risk and compliance, reconciliation, and bill payments, working with modern backend technologies on cloud-native infrastructure while mentoring teammates and helping shape engineering practices as the team grows.
**Role:** Senior Software Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** CAN: Vancouver (333 Seymour St)
**Salary:** 155000–205000 CAD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xero/49fc0d24-4d4e-4dc8-a857-53c9665fe5a3)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/xero/senior-software-engineer-payments-platform
---
## Responsibilities

- End-to-End Platform Initiative Ownership: Own significant end-to-end initiatives spanning technical design, implementation, and production validation for payment platform capabilities. Drive architectural decisions and trade-offs balancing customer simplicity, financial control, reliability, and scalability across orchestration, provider integrations, onboarding, risk and compliance, reconciliation, and bill payments.
- Distributed Systems Architecture and Design: Design and deliver highly available, reliable, and secure distributed services and high-throughput payment processing systems on cloud-native platforms. Ensure production systems remain dependable under real-world constraints with comprehensive monitoring, observability, and operational readiness.
- Production Code Development and Maintenance: Stay hands-on contributing directly to production code for the payments platform. Implement features, conduct technical deep dives, perform code reviews, and participate in pair programming sessions to raise code quality and knowledge sharing across the team.
- Multi-Provider and Multi-Region Payment Capabilities: Build reusable, provider-agnostic payment capabilities that support multiple payment methods, providers, and geographic regions. Enable teams to launch new payment products faster without rebuilding foundational infrastructure and services.
- Mentorship and Engineering Culture Development: Mentor peers and help teammates grow through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge documentation. Shape and elevate engineering practices, quality standards, and technical excellence as the Vancouver Payments Platform team scales.
- Complex Financial System Simplification: Tackle the challenge of making complex financial processes intuitive for small businesses while maintaining accuracy, security, and audit compliance. Ensure payment capabilities remain connected to the accounting record and deliver reliable reconciliation.
- AI and Innovation Integration: Evaluate and apply AI capabilities to challenging product problems with discipline and customer trust at the forefront. Use AI tools and modern development practices with good judgment to accelerate delivery and raise quality standards.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product, design, and engineering partners to deliver secure, trusted payment experiences. Collaborate with stakeholders across teams to balance immediate customer value with long-term architectural coherence.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent demonstrated professional experience. Advanced degrees in relevant fields are not required but may be valuable for complex technical domains."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems and Cloud-Native Architecture","description":"Proven track record designing and delivering highly available distributed systems and high-throughput services on cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, or GCP. Strong understanding of scalability patterns, fault tolerance, data consistency, and operational readiness."}
- {"name":"Backend Programming Languages","description":"Proficiency in modern backend languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby, or C++. Willingness and enthusiasm to learn C# and .NET for Xero's technology ecosystem, with existing .NET experience considered a bonus."}
- {"name":"API Design and Data Architecture","description":"Demonstrated expertise in thoughtful API design, database selection, and architectural trade-offs. Ability to evaluate and choose appropriate data stores, caching strategies, and integration patterns for payment system requirements."}
- {"name":"Payment Systems and Financial Software","description":"Understanding of payment processing fundamentals, reconciliation, financial transaction handling, and compliance requirements. Experience building systems that handle money movement, fraud detection, or payment orchestration is highly valuable."}
- {"name":"Production Operations and Monitoring","description":"Experience building observable, maintainable systems with comprehensive logging, metrics, and alerting. Proficiency with production support, incident response, and operational readiness practices for mission-critical services."}
- {"name":"Modern Development Practices","description":"Proficiency with version control, testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end), and CI/CD practices. Ability to use AI tools and development assistance with good judgment to accelerate development velocity and code quality."}

### experience

- {"name":"7+ Years Backend Software Engineering","description":"Minimum 7 years of professional software engineering experience with significant backend and systems-level work. Demonstrated progression in technical responsibility and architectural complexity."}
- {"name":"End-to-End Product Ownership","description":"Proven record of owning significant work end-to-end, from technical design and implementation through to rollout, monitoring, and production validation. Demonstrated ability to make important technical decisions and navigate trade-offs."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems at Scale","description":"Experience building and operating distributed systems handling high throughput, with real-world production constraints. Demonstrated success with systems designed for reliability, performance, and scalability under load."}
- {"name":"Team Leadership and Mentorship","description":"Track record of mentoring engineers, leading technical discussions, and helping teammates grow. Contribution to shared engineering practices, standards, and knowledge documentation."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Experience working effectively with product, design, and other engineering teams. Demonstrated ability to balance technical considerations with customer needs and business requirements."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Cloud Platform Architecture","description":"AWS, Azure, or GCP expertise including services like Lambda, Fargate, managed databases, event streaming, and infrastructure-as-code. Understanding of cloud-native patterns and serverless architectures."}
- {"name":"Microservices and Distributed Systems","description":"Design and implementation of service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and distributed transaction handling. Experience with service mesh, API gateways, and inter-service communication patterns."}
- {"name":"Database Design and Optimization","description":"Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL solutions (DynamoDB, MongoDB), caching layers (Redis), and query optimization. Understanding of consistency models, sharding, and replication."}
- {"name":"System Design and Trade-offs","description":"Ability to architect solutions that balance performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost. Experience evaluating architectural choices and their long-term implications for growing systems."}
- {"name":"Payment and Financial Systems Knowledge","description":"Understanding of payment processing, reconciliation, accounting integration, compliance, and risk management. Familiarity with payment methods, providers, and multi-region payment infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Testing and Quality Assurance","description":"Expertise in comprehensive testing strategies including unit testing, integration testing, end-to-end testing, load testing, and chaos engineering. Commitment to code quality and reliability validation."}
- {"name":"Mentorship and Knowledge Sharing","description":"Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, conduct effective code reviews, lead pairing sessions, and document technical knowledge. Commitment to raising team capabilities and engineering standards."}

### preferred

- {"name":"C# and .NET Experience","description":"Familiarity with C#, .NET Core, or .NET Framework is preferred as it aligns with Xero's tech stack. Experience building microservices or high-performance systems in .NET is valuable."}
- {"name":"AI and Machine Learning Integration","description":"Experience evaluating and applying AI/ML capabilities to solve product problems. Understanding of responsible AI practices, bias detection, and building customer trust with AI features."}
- {"name":"Payment Gateway and Provider Integration","description":"Direct experience integrating with payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), payment processors, or payment service providers. Understanding of provider-specific APIs and reconciliation patterns."}
- {"name":"Financial Compliance and Regulation","description":"Familiarity with financial regulations, PCI-DSS compliance, KYC/AML requirements, or other payment-related compliance frameworks. Understanding of security requirements in financial systems."}
- {"name":"Open Source Contributions","description":"Active contributions to open-source projects, particularly those related to backend systems, payments, or distributed systems. Demonstrated commitment to software engineering excellence and community."}
- {"name":"Observability and SRE Practices","description":"Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus), distributed tracing, profiling, and incident response. Familiarity with SRE principles and production readiness practices."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Experience building systems with Apache Kafka, AWS EventBridge, RabbitMQ, or similar event streaming platforms. Understanding of event sourcing and CQRS patterns in distributed systems."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"AWS","description":"Primary cloud platform providing EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, EventBridge, and managed services for the payments platform."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration for deploying and scaling microservices across cloud environments."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization technology for consistent development, testing, and production deployment of services."}
- {"name":"Git and GitHub","description":"Version control and collaborative development platform for managing payment platform codebase."}
- {"name":"Jenkins or GitLab CI/CD","description":"Continuous integration and deployment pipelines for automated testing and release management."}
- {"name":"Datadog or New Relic","description":"Observability and monitoring platforms for real-time visibility into payment system performance and health."}
- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Event streaming platform for asynchronous payment processing, reconciliation events, and real-time data pipelines."}
- {"name":"Stripe, PayPal APIs","description":"External payment provider integrations for supporting multiple payment methods and global payment capabilities."}

### others

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design Patterns","description":"Implementation of patterns like service mesh, circuit breakers, retry logic, and eventual consistency for reliable payment systems."}
- {"name":"Payment Orchestration Platforms","description":"Experience or familiarity with payment orchestration concepts, multi-provider routing, and payment method abstraction."}
- {"name":"Financial Transaction Processing","description":"Understanding of transaction settlement, reconciliation, double-entry accounting, and audit trail requirements."}
- {"name":"Security and Compliance Practices","description":"PCI-DSS compliance, encryption, tokenization, secure credential handling, and financial data protection."}
- {"name":"AI and LLM Tools","description":"Proficiency using modern AI tools and LLMs to assist development, code generation, and architectural exploration."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Robust relational database for transactional consistency in payment processing and accounting integration."}
- {"name":"MySQL","description":"Scalable relational database used for core payment data and financial transaction records."}
- {"name":"DynamoDB","description":"AWS managed NoSQL database for high-throughput payment events and real-time data access patterns."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory caching and data store for session management, rate limiting, and high-performance payment operations."}
- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Search and analytics platform for payment transaction history, reconciliation, and audit logging."}

### languages

- {"name":"Java","description":"Primary backend language for high-performance, scalable systems. Expertise in modern Java versions, frameworks, and ecosystem tools."}
- {"name":"Kotlin","description":"JVM-compatible language with modern features for backend services. Used for building concurrent, maintainable payment platform components."}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Language for building efficient, concurrent microservices. Known for simplicity, fast compilation, and excellent concurrency primitives."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Used for scripting, data processing, and backend services. Valuable for rapid development and AI/ML integration within the platform."}
- {"name":"C#","description":"Primary language for Xero's technology ecosystem. .NET and C# are increasingly important for the payments platform architecture."}

### frameworks

- {"name":".NET Core","description":"Modern, open-source framework for building cross-platform backend services and microservices at scale."}
- {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Java framework for rapid microservices development, with extensive ecosystem for building production-ready applications."}
- {"name":"ASP.NET Core","description":"High-performance web framework for building APIs and services in the C# ecosystem."}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for inter-service communication within the payments platform."}
- {"name":"REST and GraphQL","description":"Modern API paradigms for building provider-agnostic payment capabilities and platform integrations."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 205000
- **min:** 155000
- **currency:** CAD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
**The role and its impact**

Payments Platform is one of Xero’s biggest areas of investment and growth - directly affecting how small businesses pay their people, buy supplies and take on their next opportunity. Here, we build the foundations for collecting and paying money through Xero, helping make payments simple, accurate and secure for customers while supporting multiple products, payment methods, providers and regions. You’ll help evolve a growing platform by building reusable, provider-agnostic capabilities across areas such as payment orchestration, provider integrations, onboarding, risk and compliance, reconciliation and bill payments.

As a Senior Engineer, you’ll own significant end-to-end initiatives from technical design through to production, helping decide how payment capabilities are designed, integrated and operated as the platform scales. You’ll stay hands-on in production code, work through trade-offs where customer simplicity, financial control, reliability and scalability matter, and collaborate closely with product and engineering partners to deliver payment experiences that are secure, trusted and easy to use. You’ll also help shape engineering practices and quality standards as the Vancouver Payments Platform team continues to grow.

**Technical Challenges:**

* **A shared payments platform**: Own a capability within the platform, such as orchestration, risk and fraud, or multi-provider support, and deliver it end-to-end. You'll be helping teams launch new payment products faster without rebuilding the same foundations.
* **Global bill payments**: Make a complex financial process feel simple for small businesses while keeping it accurate, secure and connected to the accounting record.
* **High throughput at scale**: Design and deliver reliable, secure distributed services that remain dependable under real-world production constraints, with the monitoring and operational readiness to support them.
* **Customer impact alongside architectural progress**: Improve existing systems in steps, delivering customer value quickly while contributing to a coherent long-term architecture.
* **AI capabilities customers can trust**: Apply AI to challenging product problems while protecting customer trust, and help evaluate those capabilities with the same discipline as the rest of your work.

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

* Proven track record of delivering highly available, distributed systems and high-throughput services on cloud-native platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
* Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of significant work, from design through to rollout and production validation, including the technical decisions that come with it.
* You think carefully about architecture and trade-offs, from API design to choosing the right data store, and you balance speed, quality and long-term maintainability.
* Proficiency in a modern backend stack, such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby or C++, and you are keen to learn C# and .NET, where existing experience is a bonus.
* Passion for staying hands-on, contributing to production code and technical deep dives, and using AI tools with good judgement to move faster and raise the quality bar.
* A commitment to _Go Together_ by mentoring peers, sharing technical knowledge and helping teammates grow through code reviews, pairing and documentation.

**Where and how you can work**

**This role is based in our Vancouver office, where we embrace a hybrid working model.** You will have the flexibility to work from home while joining the team in the office for "boost days" (1-2 days a week) to collaborate, socialize, and solve complex problems in person.

## 

**Our Hiring Process**

1. **TX phone screen**: a conversation with your Talent Specialist about your background, motivations and the role.
2. **Technical assessment:** a coding assessment and systems design assessment, conducted virtually with real engineers, and based on real-world scenarios.
3. **Technical deep dive**: walk through a past project you owned end-to-end, covering how you thought about it, executed it and led through its complexity.
4. **Values / Future Proof Xero**: how you show up day to day, aligned with Xero's values and capabilities such as adaptability, ownership, customer thinking and AI fluency.

**Compensation & Total Rewards**

At Xero, we value the impact and skills you bring to the team. We believe in a Total Package philosophy - ensuring your value is recognized through a holistic lens that includes base salary, performance incentives, and world-class benefits.

The expected base salary range for this role is **$155,000 - $205,000 CAD**.

Individual pay is determined by various factors, including geography, level of experience, and the specific skills you bring to the role.

In addition to base pay, Xero’s roles are eligible for the following forms of variable compensation:

* **Variable Pay:** Permanent employees are eligible to participate in our annual bonus and equity (RSU) programs. You may also be eligible for performance-based cash or equity (RSUs) incentives depending on your role level, and company performance.
* **Comprehensive Benefits:** World-class health, wellness, and retirement programs. [**Xero Perks**](https://careers.xero.com/inside-xero/benefits-wellbeing/ "https://careers.xero.com/inside-xero/benefits-wellbeing/") including Wellbeing days, generous leave, and dedicated professional development budgets.

This is a posting for an existing vacancy.

_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._