Head of Engineering - Making Payments

XeroMelbourneHybridFull-time1 week ago

Xero is seeking a Head of Engineering to lead its Making Payments team, responsible for building payment products and platform capabilities for small businesses globally. The role combines strategic leadership, technical judgement, product sense, and people leadership to shape architecture, reliability, and engineering quality. Requires experience leading multiple engineering teams through managers, deep technical judgement in distributed systems and cloud-native environments, and a track record of operational excellence.

What you'll do

Set the engineering strategy and roadmap for Making Payments, aligned to Payments Platform and product priorities.
Partner with Product and Design to understand customer problems and balance customer value, commercial outcomes, technical health, and delivery confidence.
Provide architectural leadership for scalable, secure, highly available payment systems, maintaining a clear view of system health, engineering quality, technical debt, and trade-offs.
Lead predictable delivery through clear priorities, effective planning, proactive risk management, accountability, and stakeholder alignment.
Build operational excellence through service ownership, reliability, observability, incident learning, security, and continuous improvement.
Balance investment across product development, platform capabilities, resilience, compliance, developer experience, and technical debt.
Hire and develop Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders while creating opportunities for engineers to grow.
Foster a high-trust, inclusive, collaborative culture with strong ownership, clear decisions, and a bias toward action.
Be an AI-forward engineering leader, championing practical adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices that improve quality, effectiveness, and customer outcomes.
Communicate strategy, progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to senior leaders and partners.

What you need

Must-have

Software ArchitectureDistributed SystemsCloud-nativeReliabilitySecurityScaleStrategic PlanningAI adoption

Nice-to-have

PaymentsFinancial Services

Soft skills

High EQSound judgementEmpathyResilienceTrust-buildingInclusive leadershipCollaborationOwnership

Engineering LeadershipPaymentsFintechSoftware DevelopmentMelbourneHybridAIPlatformProduct Engineering

/What you'll do

/What you need

Must-have

Nice-to-have

Soft skills

What you'll do

What you need