Principal Engineer (API Platform)

Join Xero as a Principal Engineer for Platform API, a senior individual contributor and technical leadership role. You will define and drive the long-term technical vision for Xero's API layer, impacting millions of small businesses and their advisors. This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and AI, shaping the future of Xero's accounting workflows. You will work closely with product management, AI/ML teams, developer relations, and engineering squads across the company.

• Defining and driving the long-term technical vision for Xero's API platform, ensuring it meets the needs of external partners and internal product teams.
• Designing and stewarding APIs that serve as the foundation for AI- and agent-driven automation across Xero’s accounting workflows.
• Leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives, shaping technical strategy, facilitating design reviews, and aligning multiple stakeholders.
• Exposure to LLM- or ML-powered products, agentic architectures, or AI safety and governance concerns, and an understanding of how API and event design decisions affect model quality, safety, and reliability
• A genuine approach to mentoring and growing engineering capability in others; from coaching individual engineers through to building communities of practice around platform and API thinking
• Proven experience designing and evolving external-facing APIs and SDKs, including lifecycle practices such as versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility, with a genuine interest in developer experience
• 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
• A deep background in backend or platform engineering at scale; ideally in multi-tenant SaaS or distributed systems environments, with strong proficiency in a modern language such as C#, Go, or Java
• A track record of leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives: shaping technical strategy, facilitating design reviews and RFCs, and aligning multiple stakeholders without losing momentum
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture (webhooks, message queues, pub/sub patterns, and idempotent consumers) and the ability to design for failure and recovery in these systems