Head of Engineering - Making Payments

About the Role

Xero reimagined accounting software. Now, we’re reimagining the flow of money itself.

We’re making a critical, multi-year investment in our Payments Platform: the foundation for how small businesses move money across Xero globally. The Making Payments team builds products and capabilities that help businesses pay bills and move money simply, securely, and reliably.

As Head of Engineering, you will lead multiple teams responsible for product experiences and platform capabilities. You will set engineering direction, shape the roadmap with Product and Design, and create the conditions for high-quality customer and business outcomes.

This role combines strategic leadership, technical judgement, product sense, and people leadership. You will be a technical anchor for the organisation, maintaining a clear view of architecture, reliability, engineering quality, and long-term sustainability while enabling teams to deliver at pace.

You will help define how Making Payments evolves as a product and engineering organisation. This includes shaping the architecture for payments, balancing platform investment with product delivery, strengthening operational excellence, and building a high-performing leadership and engineering team.

As an engineering leader at Xero, you will bring high EQ, sound judgement, empathy, resilience, and the ability to build trust. You will lead our vision and values, creating an inclusive environment where people can do their best work and grow.

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 We’re Looking For

• Experience leading multiple engineering teams through Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, with a track record of setting direction and accountability.
• Deep technical judgement across software architecture, distributed systems, cloud-native environments, reliability, security, and scale.
• Strong product sense and strategic planning, with the ability to connect engineering choices to customer and business outcomes.
• A track record of operating high-quality production systems and improving reliability, service ownership, and operational effectiveness.
• Sound judgement in complex trade-offs, with experience partnering across Product, Design, Risk, Operations, Security, and other functions.
• Demonstrated ability to grow talent and leaders, build an inclusive high-trust culture, navigate conflict, and champion AI adoption. Experience in payments, financial services, or another complex or regulated domain is valuable.

Why Join Us

• Shape the future of money movement at Xero through a strategically important Payments Platform organisation.
• Lead both product and platform engineering as Making Payments grows from early investment into a globally scaled capability.
• Work on meaningful problems across money movement, payment experiences, reliability, and customer value.
• Make foundational architectural decisions that improve speed to market, resilience, and provider flexibility.
• Build and grow a high-performing engineering organisation and its leadership culture.
• Have visible impact through a significant roadmap and broad organisational scope.

Where and How You Can Work

This is a Melbourne-based role. Xero offers a hybrid working environment with a mix of office-based collaboration and remote flexibility. We use boost days to bring teams together in our modern office spaces to foster connection, alignment, and creativity.