---
title: 'Head of Engineering - Making Payments at Xero'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-making-payments-xero-melbourne-dzwx3qsaay0t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-31'
---

# Head of Engineering - Making Payments at Xero

- **Company:** [Xero](https://feeny.ai/companies/xero)
- **Location:** Melbourne, Australia
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-31
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xero/618a1b82-9b87-4942-8ef9-bdb81c992879

## Job description

## 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.

## About Xero

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Xero provides cloud-based accounting and financial management software for small businesses, serving over 4.9 million customers worldwide.
- **Entity Type**: Public (ASX: XRO, S&P/ASX 200 component)
- **Headquarters**: Wellington, New Zealand
- **Founded**: July 6, 2006
- **Founders**: Rod Drury, Hamish Edwards

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cloud accounting software (SaaS)
- **Target customers**: Small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers (B2B)
- **Mission**: To make life better for small businesses globally by automating routine tasks and delivering actionable insights.

## Products & Services
- **Xero Accounting Software**: Cloud-based platform for invoicing, bank reconciliation, expense tracking, payroll, and financial reporting. Sold by subscription (Starter, Standard, Premium tiers).
- **JAX – AI Finance Partner**: An AI-powered assistant integrated into Xero that automates routine tasks and provides insights to help businesses grow.
- **Xero Ecosystem**: Over 1,000 third-party app integrations via the Xero App Store, covering payments, inventory, CRM, and more.
- **Xero for Nonprofits**: Discounted subscriptions (25% off) for eligible nonprofit and community organisations.
- **Xero for Purpose**: Social impact initiatives including financial literacy programmes (Unlock Your Numbers), sustainability tools (Sumday carbon app), and the Xero Beautiful Business Fund (NZ$750,000+ in funding annually).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed in provided sources (publicly traded with market cap available on ASX; latest data not included in search results).
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue NZ$2.103 billion (FY2025); Net income NZ$227.8 million (FY2025).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Board Chair David Thodey; CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. In June 2025, Xero announced an agreement to acquire Melio, a New York-based payments provider, for $2.5 billion.
- **Growth Signals**: Achieved Rule of 40 outcomes of 41.0% (May 2024) and 43.9% (Nov 2024). Customer base grew to 4.9 million. Headcount of 4,610 employees (2025). Expanding globally with offices in New Zealand, Australia, UK, US, Canada, South Africa, and Singapore.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Market leader** in cloud accounting across New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.
- **AI-first approach** with JAX, embedded directly into the core product to reduce manual work.
- **Extensive integration ecosystem** (1,000+ apps) creating high switching costs for customers.
- **Strong brand trust** built over 19 years with a focus on small business success.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI and automation**: Deepening AI capabilities (JAX) to deliver predictive insights and automate finance workflows.
- **Payments expansion**: Acquisition of Melio to strengthen payments capabilities for small businesses.
- **Sustainability**: Reducing carbon emissions (72% reduction in scope 1 & 2), offering free carbon accounting tools, and supporting small business sustainability.
- **Social impact**: Scaling programmes like the Beautiful Business Fund and financial literacy initiatives.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values-driven, human-centric organisation with a focus on making a tangible impact on small businesses globally.
- **Flexibility**: Emphasises a flexible environment and time for what matters most (remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated but implied).
- **Perks & benefits**:
  - One paid day off per year for volunteering (Community Connect programme).
  - Free access to Sumday carbon accounting app for employees.
  - Financial literacy resources and mentorship programmes.
- **Engineering & innovation**: Dedicated Engineering and Data & AI teams (open roles visible on careers page). Global collaboration across 7+ countries.
- **Diversity & inclusion**: Indigenous inclusion initiatives (te ao Māori in NZ, Reconciliation Action Plan in Australia), support for Indigenous communities.
- **Sustainability focus**: Employees can contribute to environmental goals through company-wide initiatives.

## Sources
1. [Wikipedia – Xero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xero)
2. [Xero About Page](https://www.xero.com/au/about/)
3. [Xero Careers – Inside Xero](https://careers.xero.com/inside-xero/)
4. [Xero Careers – Teams](https://careers.xero.com/)
5. [Xero Homepage](https://www.xero.com/)

## Other roles at Xero

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