Xero

Senior Backend Engineer, Payments Platform

Xero

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: Remote • California • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $179,500 - $219,400 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsGoJavaNoSQLSQL

About the role

  • Design and build core services: Contribute to the development of reliable, scalable, performant, and secure services that power Xero’s Payments Platform.
  • Drive technical design: Lead the design and implementation of complex features and projects, ensuring solutions are robust and extensible.
  • Stay hands-on: Write production-quality code, build proof-of-concepts, and participate in design and code reviews.
  • Solve challenging problems: Work on distributed systems, global payment integrations, compliance, and risk-related challenges.
  • Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, and Operations to translate business needs into technical solutions.
  • Mentor teammates: Support the growth of junior engineers by sharing knowledge, providing feedback, and modeling best practices.
  • Champion operational excellence: Contribute to on-call practices, observability, and monitoring to ensure high system reliability.
  • Continuously improve: Stay up-to-date on industry trends, adopt new technologies where appropriate, and improve team processes and practices.

Requirements

  • 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record delivering highly available, distributed backend systems at scale.
  • Strong expertise in system design, API development, and building reliable, high-throughput services—balancing trade-offs between new and existing systems.
  • Proficiency in at least one modern backend stack (e.g. C# a bonus, Java, Golang, C++) and experience with cloud-native platforms (AWS a bonus).
  • Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases.
  • Ability to drive technical design and lead implementation of complex projects end-to-end.
  • Experience mentoring junior engineers and helping raise the technical bar within a team.
  • Familiarity with payments, fintech, or other highly regulated, compliance-heavy domains (preferred but not required).
  • Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work effectively in an agile, collaborative environment.
  • Commitment to code quality—experience with code reviews, testing practices, and building maintainable systems.
Benefits
  • very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!)
  • dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing
  • Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family
  • employee resource groups
  • wellbeing programming and allowances
  • medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance
  • fertility and family forming financial support
  • 401k contribution matching
  • 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers
  • Employee Share Plan
  • beautiful offices with snacks and break areas
  • flexible working
  • career development

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard skills
software engineeringsystem designAPI developmentbackend systemsC#JavaGolangC++SQLNoSQL
Soft skills
problem-solvingmentoringcollaborationtechnical designleadershipcommunicationfeedbackagileoperational excellencecontinuous improvement