Staff / Lead Engineer - Reporting Team
Lead Engineer · Lead · Full Time
Opens Xero's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Join Xero's Reporting team as a Staff/Lead Engineer in a hands-on technical leadership role focused on setting direction for a core accounting platform serving small businesses globally. This is a non-people-management position where you'll drive significant technical outcomes from discovery through production, balancing customer needs with system health while remaining deeply involved in code, architecture, and technical decision-making. You'll guide platform modernization, mentor senior engineers, and influence critical workflows that help accounting professionals and small business owners make faster, data-driven decisions.
Responsibilities
- Technical Direction & Strategy: Establish and communicate technical direction across the Reporting platform, balancing customer outcomes, delivery velocity, and long-term system health. Make strategic decisions about architecture, technology choices, and technical roadmap priorities while maintaining flexibility to adapt to emerging requirements and market opportunities.
- Complex Initiative Leadership: Lead significant technical initiatives through their complete lifecycle—from early discovery and design phases through production rollout and operational learning. Manage scope, dependencies, and trade-offs while ensuring deliverables meet quality standards and business objectives.
- Platform Modernization: Guide the modernization of the reporting platform to improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed. Design and execute technical improvements that reduce technical debt, enhance system resilience, and enable faster feature development cycles.
- Architecture & Systems Design: Shape architecture decisions, API design, and system boundaries for complex reporting problems involving data processing, analytics, and financial workflows. Ensure systems are designed for performance, correctness, and maintainability at scale.
- Cross-Team Collaboration & Alignment: Work closely with engineers, product managers, designers, principal engineers, and platform teams to turn ambiguity into practical solutions. Build consensus across teams, communicate technical implications clearly, and keep high-impact work moving forward through effective stakeholder alignment.
- Hands-On Technical Contribution: Remain deeply involved in technical work through code reviews, implementation of complex components, technical spikes, design reviews, debugging, and incident response. Lead by example in code quality, technical rigor, and practical problem-solving.
- Risk Management & Trade-Off Analysis: Proactively identify technical risks, dependencies, and integration points across systems. Help teams make clear, pragmatic trade-offs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability with full understanding of business implications.
- Engineering Mentorship & Capability Building: Coach Senior Engineers and lead technical discussions to raise the quality of technical decisions and engineering practices throughout the team. Invest in team growth through knowledge sharing, design mentorship, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
- Data Platform Integration: Strengthen how Reporting works with shared data and platform capabilities across Xero. Collaborate with platform teams to leverage common infrastructure, maintain data consistency, and ensure efficient integration patterns across the organization.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Backend & Platform Engineering at Scale
Proven deep experience building and maintaining backend systems or platform infrastructure in large-scale environments, with demonstrated ability to design for performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
SaaS Architecture & Multi-Tenancy
Experience architecting or maintaining systems in SaaS environments where reliability, scalability, and data isolation are critical. Understanding of how design decisions impact operational costs and customer experience.
Data-Heavy Systems & Analytics
Strong background with data-intensive or analytics-oriented systems, with demonstrated focus on performance optimization, data correctness, and building trust in calculations. Experience with query optimization, data pipelines, or reporting infrastructure is valuable.
Distributed Systems Design
Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including eventual consistency, data replication, failure modes, and trade-offs between availability, consistency, and partition tolerance. Ability to simplify complex system interactions.
Production Operations & Incident Response
Direct experience managing production systems, conducting incident response, learning from failures, and implementing systematic improvements. Comfort with observability, monitoring, and operational visibility.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline. Advanced degree is a plus but not required if you have equivalent professional experience and demonstrated expertise.
Equivalent Professional Experience
Substantial professional software engineering experience (10+ years) demonstrating depth and breadth in system design, architecture, and technical leadership can substitute for formal qualifications. Preference for candidates with proven track record of significant technical impact.
Experience
Technical Leadership & Architecture Direction
Demonstrated track record of setting technical direction across a team, domain, or complex problem space. Evidence of leading architectural decisions that have improved system properties or enabled new capabilities at scale.
Delivering Significant Initiatives Through Ambiguity
Proven ability to lead major projects with unclear requirements or evolving scope, making good decisions with incomplete information, and delivering durable outcomes in production that withstand operational challenges.
Systems Thinking & Simplification
Track record of understanding complex systems holistically and simplifying them—reducing surface area, cutting dependencies, improving maintainability. Ability to communicate simplified models effectively to diverse audiences.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Strong experience working across engineering, product, design, and operations teams in fast-moving environments. Demonstrated ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders and build alignment on complex trade-offs.
Mentoring & Technical Coaching
Experience coaching other engineers, conducting effective technical reviews, and raising the bar for technical decision-making on teams. Genuine interest in developing others' technical capabilities and fostering ownership culture.
Skills
Required
Architectural Thinking & System Design
Strong ability to think about systems holistically, design boundaries between components, evaluate technology choices, and make trade-offs between correctness, performance, and maintainability. Comfort making architectural decisions with incomplete information and under uncertainty.
Backend Development Expertise
Deep, hands-on proficiency in backend development with demonstrated ability to build reliable, performant systems at scale. Strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, databases, and systems programming.
Technical Communication
Exceptional ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to engineers at all levels, product managers, designers, and executives. Skilled at creating clarity from ambiguity and aligning teams around technical decisions and trade-offs.
Code Quality & Technical Excellence
Demonstrated commitment to code quality, readability, and maintainability. Ability to review code thoughtfully, provide constructive feedback, and set high standards for technical rigor while maintaining pragmatism about delivery timelines.
Problem-Solving & Debugging
Strong analytical and debugging skills with ability to investigate complex, multi-system issues methodically. Comfortable digging into unfamiliar systems, reading code you didn't write, and reasoning about system behavior under load.
Ownership & Accountability
Takes ownership of outcomes beyond your direct contributions. Follows problems to resolution, learns from failures, and drives systematic improvements. Comfortable with both small details and big-picture strategy.
Preferred
Financial Software & Accounting Domain Knowledge
Nice to havePrior experience building systems for accounting, fintech, or financial services. Understanding of accounting concepts, reporting requirements, compliance, and how financial software impacts small business operations.
AI/ML Integration & Emerging Technologies
Nice to haveCuriosity and experience with AI-enabled workflows, large language models, or machine learning integration into product features. Ability to evaluate how to support these capabilities responsibly within financial systems.
Data Pipeline & Analytics Architecture
Nice to haveExperience designing or maintaining data pipelines, analytics platforms, or reporting systems. Familiarity with challenges of data freshness, correctness, and performance at scale.
Open-Source & Community Contribution
Nice to haveActive open-source contribution or community involvement demonstrating thought leadership. Evidence of influencing engineering practices beyond your immediate team.
Performance Optimization & Observability
Nice to haveDemonstrated expertise in profiling systems, identifying bottlenecks, and optimizing for performance. Strong background in building observability, metrics, and logging infrastructure for complex systems.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·CAD 186,000 – 236,000
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Equity & Variable Compensation
Competitive equity package as part of total compensation philosophy. Performance-based incentives and commissions available based on role level and performance outcomes, recognizing your full contribution beyond base salary.
Comprehensive Health & Wellness Programs
World-class health, dental, and vision coverage. Mental health support, wellness initiatives, and preventive health programs designed to support your overall wellbeing and work-life balance.
Retirement & Financial Planning
Competitive retirement benefits and financial planning support to help you build long-term security. Access to retirement planning resources and employer contribution programs.
Professional Development & Learning
Investment in continuous learning through conference attendance, training programs, online courses, and technical certifications. Access to resources supporting your growth as a technical leader and engineer.
Flexible Work Arrangement
Hybrid working model balancing remote flexibility with collaborative office time. Designated boost days to connect with team in Xero's modern downtown Vancouver office at 333 Seymour Street, with flexibility for focused independent work.
Xero Perks & Lifestyle Benefits
Comprehensive benefits suite including wellness initiatives, employee discounts, lifestyle perks, and additional support programs. Access to Xero's full range of employee resources and community programs.
Full posting
Original listing.
The role / impact
This is a hands-on Lead Engineer role in Xero’s Reporting team. You’ll set technical direction for one of the most-used parts of our product and help the team make good decisions through complex, ambiguous work.
You’ll lead significant technical outcomes from early thinking through to production. That means balancing customer needs and delivery pace with the long-term health of the systems behind Reporting, while staying close to the code.
This isn’t a people-management role. You’ll lead through technical judgement, clear communication, hands-on contribution, and by helping other engineers do their best work.
Your work will influence how small businesses and their advisors understand performance, complete reporting and compliance tasks, and get to the right answers faster.
The team / how they connect
You’ll join Xero’s Reporting group, which builds experiences customers rely on to understand their numbers, share insights, and support important accounting workflows.
You’ll work closely with engineers, product managers, designers, principal engineers, and platform teams. A big part of the role is turning ambiguity into a practical path forward, aligning people across teams, and keeping important work moving.
Where and how you can work
We support a hybrid working model that blends the flexibility of working from home with the collaboration of being in the office. Our office is located downtown Vancouver at 333 Seymour Street. You will spend time connecting with your team in our modern office spaces on designated boost days, balancing focused independent work with in-person connection.
Initially, you will focus on
Setting technical direction across Reporting, balancing customer outcomes, delivery needs, and system health
Leading complex initiatives from discovery and design through rollout and production learning
Guiding the modernisation of the reporting platform to improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed
Strengthening how Reporting works with shared data and platform capabilities across Xero
Shaping architecture, APIs, and system boundaries for complex reporting problems
Staying hands-on through code, technical spikes, design reviews, debugging, and incident response
Identifying risks and dependencies early, and helping teams make clear, pragmatic trade-offs
Coaching Senior Engineers and raising the quality of technical decisions and engineering practices
Here are some of the things we are looking for
Deep experience in backend, platform, or product engineering at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment
A track record of setting technical direction across a team, domain, or complex problem space
Experience leading significant initiatives through ambiguity and delivering durable outcomes in production
Strong architectural judgement and the ability to simplify complex systems
Experience with data-heavy or analytics-oriented systems, with a strong focus on performance, correctness, and trust
A hands-on approach to code, design, technical investigation, and production problem-solving
The ability to communicate clearly and build alignment across engineering, product, design, and platform teams
A genuine interest in coaching Senior Engineers and lifting capability beyond your own work
Curiosity about emerging product experiences, including AI-enabled workflows, and how to support them responsibly
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. We are also tech stack agnostic, so please apply if you've worked with adjacent technologies.
Compensation Philosophy
At Xero, we value the impact and skills you bring to the team. We don’t just hire for a role; we invest in people. We believe in a Total Package philosophy - which means your value isn't just a single number on a paycheck. While base salary is a core component, we look at your compensation through a holistic lens that includes equity, performance incentives, and world-class benefits.
The base salary range for this role in Canada is $186,000 - $236,000 CAD.
Please note that this range represents base salary only. We believe in rewarding our people for their total contribution, which is why we look at compensation through a holistic lens. In addition to base pay, your total package may include:
Variable Pay: Eligibility commissions or equity based on role and performance.
Comprehensive Benefits: World-class health, wellness, and retirement programs.
Xero Perks: Inside Xero Explore our full suite of benefits, from wellbeing initiatives to professional development.
Individual pay is determined by various factors, including geography, level of experience, and the specific skills you bring to the role
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