Senior Search Engineer

Description

This is a role for a search specialist who wants to work at genuine scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere; part of an entire vertical stack delivered to customers. The work is both meaningful and technically stretching: keeping 50+ million searchable documents and 400 terabytes of searchable data at global scale running at 99.9% uptime, whilst contributing to a significant four-year platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero's growth. Currently serving over 200,000 daily active users, this is a product at meaningful scale.

Beyond the day-to-day, this role is about real ownership. You will contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review pull requests, and lead projects. If you are someone who cares about quality and gets energised by hard problems at scale, this is a place where your work will genuinely matter.

The team and how they connect

The Search team is a small, tight-knit group spread across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand, now part of Xero's Catalyst platform division. You will partner closely with this experienced group who are building the next generation of search infrastructure, a dedicated Product Manager, a Principal Architect, and the Catalyst Platform team who coordinate changes and releases across services. The team brings a high-quality mindset to everything they do, and solves challenging technical problems together.

The team is currently working on

A large-scale search platform rebuild (Horizon 2) – a multi-year project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, addressing critical infrastructure limits and building a scalable future

Maintaining and evolving the cluster to keep systems running at 99.9% uptime whilst serving over 200,000 daily active users

Integrating with the ODL (Operational Data Layer) on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform

Exploring new partnership opportunities with Mobile, Files, and AI-adjacent search capabilities as the platform evolves

Where and how you can work

This role can be based in Australia or New Zealand. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day. The team comes together in Melbourne approximately every six months; a chance to connect, align, and spend time in person with colleagues across regions. Xero also offers boost days, giving you the option to work from the office and collaborate with the broader Xero community when it suits you.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

You bring strong search engineering experience and know what it takes to build, maintain and scale search systems in a production environment handling hundreds of millions of documents

Solid software engineering and development fundamentals are part of your toolkit, and you are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work

Quality comes first for you – you hold a high bar for the code you write and review, and care about doing things properly

Working collaboratively with others comes naturally to you, whether that is with engineering, product or infrastructure teams across a distributed environment

Responsibilities

• This is a role for a search specialist who wants to work at genuine scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere; part of an entire vertical stack delivered to customers. The work is both meaningful and technically stretching: keeping 50+ million searchable documents and 400 terabytes of searchable data at global scale running at 99.9% uptime, whilst contributing to a significant four-year platform rebuild that will shape the next generation of Xero's growth. Currently serving over 200,000 daily active users, this is a product at meaningful scale.
• Beyond the day-to-day, this role is about real ownership. You will contribute across both search-specific and generalist engineering work, raise and review pull requests, and lead projects. If you are someone who cares about quality and gets energised by hard problems at scale, this is a place where your work will genuinely matter.
• The team and how they connect
• The Search team is a small, tight-knit group spread across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand, now part of Xero's Catalyst platform division. You will partner closely with this experienced group who are building the next generation of search infrastructure, a dedicated Product Manager, a Principal Architect, and the Catalyst Platform team who coordinate changes and releases across services. The team brings a high-quality mindset to everything they do, and solves challenging technical problems together.
• The team is currently working on
• A large-scale search platform rebuild (Horizon 2) – a multi-year project at the heart of Xero's infrastructure, addressing critical infrastructure limits and building a scalable future
• Maintaining and evolving the cluster to keep systems running at 99.9% uptime whilst serving over 200,000 daily active users
• Integrating with the ODL (Operational Data Layer) on the ingestion pipeline for the new platform
• Exploring new partnership opportunities with Mobile, Files, and AI-adjacent search capabilities as the platform evolves
• Where and how you can work
• This role can be based in Australia or New Zealand. You will have genuine flexibility in where you work day to day. The team comes together in Melbourne approximately every six months; a chance to connect, align, and spend time in person with colleagues across regions. Xero also offers boost days, giving you the option to work from the office and collaborate with the broader Xero community when it suits you.
• Here are some of the things we are looking for
• You bring strong search engineering experience and know what it takes to build, maintain and scale search systems in a production environment handling hundreds of millions of documents
• Solid software engineering and development fundamentals are part of your toolkit, and you are comfortable contributing to both search-specific and generalist engineering work
• Quality comes first for you – you hold a high bar for the code you write and review, and care about doing things properly
• Working collaboratively with others comes naturally to you, whether that is with engineering, product or infrastructure teams across a distributed environment