Senior Principal Engineer (Product Platform Engineering)

Join Xero, a leading global accounting software platform, as a Senior Principal Engineer in the Product Platform Engineering organization. In this role, you will shape the long-term technical direction and architecture across the entire organization, leading large-scale architectural initiatives and establishing principles and frameworks for technical decision-making. You will modernize core architecture, drive architectural strategy, and define company-wide engineering practices. This is a high-level technical leadership position that requires exceptional alignment skills, a vision for AI-native engineering, and a proven track record in evolving legacy architectures.

• Shape the long-term technical direction and architecture across the entire organization, leading large-scale architectural initiatives.
• Drive architectural strategy starting with the invoicing workflow vertical slice, before expanding across Bank Feeds, Product Packaging & Subscriptions (PP&S), and core platform data flows.
• Establish the technical foundations, principles, and safety guardrails required to support safe agentic development, autonomous operations, and AI-native engineering workflows across all of Xero.
• Exceptional ability to align senior stakeholders, C-suite executives, and cross-functional VP leadership around bold architectural bets using clear technical vision, strategic diplomacy, and inspirational storytelling
• Demonstrated vision in preparing platform architecture for AI-native engineering, automated software delivery, and advanced reliability paradigms at global scale
• Proven track record operating at the highest levels of technical authority, shaping long-term strategy, and influencing technical direction across large engineering organizations (1,000+ engineers)
• Deep experience evolving massive, business-critical legacy architectures into modern, decoupled product platforms, unified API layers (e.g., GraphQL/REST), and distributed microservices
• Passion for building first-class APIs, shared libraries, and platform capabilities that abstract deep domain complexity for internal engineering customers while upholding strict data integrity standards