Lead Engineer - Acc Core

Description

Team: Accounting Core

Location / work arrangement: San Francisco, San Mateo, Seattle & Vancouver (Canada)

Employment type: Full Time

About the Role

Xero’s ledger is the source of truth for millions of businesses, and every product we ship is built on top of it. We are rebuilding this integrity layer for the next 20 years, and we are standing up the Vancouver engineering hub around it from day one. As Lead Engineer, you will make the architectural decisions that set the course for the platform and the team, and you will see those decisions reach every customer who depends on Xero to get their numbers right.

The Technical Challenges

Correctness at scale. Accounting data has to be consistent, auditable, and immutable. There is no “close enough,” and every change to the ledger has to preserve that guarantee across regions and regulations.

Evolving a mature system. We are adding real-time expectations to a platform that millions of businesses depend on daily. That means strengthening service boundaries and clarifying data contracts without compromising reliability.

Durable, high-throughput services. We use durable execution (for example, Temporal) to keep long-running financial workflows accurate and recoverable under load.

AI-ready data. We are structuring accounting data so it can power AI-native experiences while maintaining trust in the numbers.

Impact

First six months: You understand the ledger and its consumers, align the team on service boundaries and data contracts, and ship a first modernization increment with no loss of data integrity.

First twelve months:

You have set the architecture for the core accounting capabilities (general ledger, journals, chart of accounts, multi-currency).

The Vancouver engineering team has clear ownership and quality standards, thanks in part to your leadership and role modeling.

Your work reaches customers through every product built on the ledger, and the decisions made now will shape Xero for years.

Ownership

You will own the technical direction for your area of the accounting platform, from design through production and on-call. You will make architectural decisions on service boundaries, data contracts, and technology choices without needing sign-off, and you will be accountable for reliability and data integrity end to end. You will also help set hiring, quality, and ownership practices for an early and growing team, which will compound over time.

Who You’ll Work With

Bernardo Farah is the Director of Engineering for Accounting Core. He has over 10 years of SaaS software experience, including six years building platforms and growing teams at Samsara.

What You Bring

Requirements

• You set the standard for your team in AI-assisted development, operational excellence, and flexible architecture.
• A track record delivering highly available, distributed backend systems and designing high-throughput services under production constraints.
• Depth in system architecture, API design, and both SQL and NoSQL databases
• Proficiency in a modern backend stack such as C, Java, Go, or C++, plus cloud-native platforms like AWS.
• You demonstrate strong ability in breaking down complex problems into clear, actionable solutions while driving agile execution to deliver results.
• Experience with financial, ledger, or accounting systems, or other domains where data integrity is critical
• Experience with durable execution or workflow engines such as Temporal
• Experience modernizing a mature system without disrupting customers

Conditions

Process is a tool for impact and we adjust accordingly. We use an agile approach to ship outcomes, not to follow ceremony. Code and design reviews are where we trade ideas and hold the quality bar, and we are figuring out how to use LLMs to reduce how much code humans have to write and review by hand. Our on-call rotation draws on a healthy pool of engineers and turns incidents into learning through postmortems. Decisions are made at every level, and we make sure everyone has the strategic context to raise proposals and drive innovation.

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 expected base salary range for this role in:

California: $206,000 USD

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: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k) match, and 21 days PTO, 10 days of Wellbeing leave, 5 days of Xtra Leave, 1 volunteer day, 12 paid holidays, paid parental leave. Further information included on our Xero Perks page.

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.