---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer - ML & AI (AI Products) at Xero'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-ml-ai-ai-products-xero-sydney-n884h2tzb914'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Senior Software Engineer - ML & AI (AI Products) at Xero

- **Company:** [Xero](https://feeny.ai/companies/xero)
- **Location:** Sydney, Australia
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/xero/4f9a785e-0cd4-4e96-ba9e-d0cccc2e29e5

## Job description

## The role

You will design, build and own the production systems behind Xero’s AI features: the services, pipelines and infrastructure that power LLM-driven and agentic experiences for millions of small businesses every day. This is a software engineering role. You’ll build and operate systems rather than train or tune models, and your architecture decisions will directly shape scale, cost, reliability and how fast our teams ship. You don’t need a machine learning background. We’re looking for strong production engineers, ideally with experience building LLM or agentic systems, and ML depth can be learned on the team. Beyond architecture, you’ll lift engineering capability across AI Products by setting standards, mentoring engineers and partnering across Xero to make data usable and systems dependable.

The team

You’ll join AI Products, a diverse, globally distributed team of scientists, engineers, product managers and analysts within our broader Data & AI business. Engineers here partner closely with Applied Scientists early on to build the interfaces and harnesses that take models into production. They then own the engineering and infrastructure of every ML and AI system shipped into production, from reliability and cost to scale. Together, this collaborative team reduces toil and delivers reliable, intelligent experiences for small businesses.

The team is currently working on

- Production ML and AI engineering: Building and operating the platforms, services and practices that support traditional ML models, generative AI and agentic systems in production.
- JAX (Just Ask Xero): Powering Xero's conversational GenAI assistant and evolving the underlying capabilities to support increasingly sophisticated, context-aware and agentic experiences.
- Intelligent financial workflows: Developing capabilities such as Automated Bank Reconciliation and smart document capture, using ML and AI to match transactions, extract information from bills and receipts, and automate complex tasks.
- XeroForce: Building the platform for AI-powered workflows, enabling agents to plan and execute complex tasks across Xero’s products and supporting reliable, reusable agentic experiences at scale.
- End-to-end AI product experiences: Integrating AI into customer-facing experiences and product workflows, alongside the backend services, orchestration and infrastructure that make them work.

Where and how you can work Xero offers a flexible hybrid working model designed to blend the collaboration of office life with the autonomy of remote work. You will have access to our modern office spaces, with expectations around office days and collaborative 'boost days' aligned to help your team connect and ship great code effectively.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

- A track record of designing, shipping and operating production-grade backend systems at scale
- Experience building and operating production systems for LLM or agentic workloads (orchestration, tool use, evaluation, guardrails, latency and cost management)
- Strong system design fundamentals and excellent coding in Python, or another language suited to web-scale services (Go, Java, Kotlin, TypeScript)
- Experience with APIs and service design, cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), CI/CD and observability, with a focus on latency, cost, reliability and SLOs
- Experience running services in production, including on-call and incident response
- Solid SQL and experience with large-scale data processing
- Excellent communication, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to business and technical audiences
- A coaching mindset and the ability to set engineering standards and mentor other engineers

## Nice to have

- Experience operationalizing ML or LLM workloads (inference serving, evaluation pipelines)
- Familiarity with MLflow, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and data orchestration tools
- Distributed processing experience (Spark, Dask)

Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.

## 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

- [Customer Experience Specialist - Melio](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-experience-specialist-melio-xero-manchester-0apnfjtyx359) — Manchester, United Kingdom
- [Engineering Manager - Cloud Networks](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-cloud-networks-xero-melbourne-8gqw69bv1r7w) — Melbourne, Australia
- [Lead Engineer - Front End (React)](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-engineer-front-end-react-xero-wellington-9sjxsd4a6d13) — Wellington, New Zealand
- [Senior Engineer - AI Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-engineer-ai-platform-xero-melbourne-wy84yt8bba9z) — Melbourne, Australia
- [Financial Accountant](https://feeny.ai/job/financial-accountant-xero-wellington-0bjk26repmzk) — Wellington, New Zealand
- [Lead Engineer - Front End (React)](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-engineer-front-end-react-xero-melbourne-k9j5m5627ab0) — Melbourne, Australia
- [Accounting Professional? Discover a new career in SaaS Sales with Xero](https://feeny.ai/job/accounting-professional-discover-a-new-career-in-saas-sales-with-xero-xero-sd3m7hjzea5f) — Brisbane, Australia
- [Solutions Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-consultant-xero-brisbane-rj5t374ksh02) — Brisbane, Australia
- [Engineer - Payments](https://feeny.ai/job/engineer-payments-xero-vancouver-v6a1s8dc9eqt) — Vancouver, Canada
- [Data Engineer - Performance Insights](https://feeny.ai/job/data-engineer-performance-insights-xero-sydney-ndt7sgmv8xdm) — Sydney, Australia