Engineer - Payments Platform

The role / impact You will help build the platforms and product capabilities that support money movement through Xero, from collecting invoice payments and paying bills to supporting payroll and future payment experiences. Your work will make payments feel more connected within Xero, helping small businesses manage their money with greater ease and confidence. You will take ownership of meaningful engineering problems, building reliable, secure and scalable software where financial accuracy matters. Working closely with engineering, product and operational partners, you will help shape technical decisions, make trade-offs clear and balance delivery with the controls needed to protect customers and their money. Through thoughtful communication, knowledge sharing and constructive feedback, you will contribute to an inclusive team culture and help improve how a growing engineering organization works. The team / how they connect You will join Payments Platform Engineering, an early-stage organization building the foundations for collecting and paying money through Xero. The team is creating reusable capabilities that can support multiple products, payment methods, providers and regions, while staying closely connected to customer needs. The work spans payment orchestration, provider integrations, onboarding and verification, risk, reconciliation and internal ledger capabilities. As the organization takes shape, you will have the opportunity to influence architecture, challenge assumptions and help define how payment experiences are built and scaled across Xero. The team is currently working on / Initially, you will focus on - Evolving systems tightly coupled to invoicing into reusable payment capabilities that support multiple products, providers and regions. - Building payment orchestration and provider integrations, with clear boundaries between payment methods, providers and the networks that move money. - Developing foundations across customer onboarding, know-your-business verification, entity management, risk and compliance. - Strengthening reconciliation, dispute handling and internal ledger capabilities so financial events are represented accurately and can be traced. - Supporting bill payments and broader incoming and outgoing money flows, with reliability, security and observability built in. - Applying AI and automation where they can reduce manual effort, while maintaining clear controls and appropriate human oversight. Your initial area of ownership will sit within these priorities, with room to shape both the technical approach and how the team delivers. Where and how you can work This role is based in Vancouver. We operate on a hybrid model where you will spend one to two days a week in the office for collaborative technical discussions and team alignment, with the flexibility to work from home on the other days. Here are some of the things we are looking for - You bring strong backend software engineering experience and a track record of building and operating reliable services in production. - You understand distributed systems and can reason through service boundaries,consistency, resilience and failure handling. - You have practical experience working with transactional data, where correctness, integrity and traceability are essential. - You can work through ambiguous problems, make pragmatic architectural decisions and recognise when to improve an existing system or take a new approach. - You take ownership beyond implementation, considering automated testing, deployment, observability and the ongoing operation of your services. - You communicate clearly and collaborate well across engineering, product and operational teams, connecting technical decision