Engineering Manager - Payments Platform

About The Role

Small businesses rely on timely payments to sustain operations and seize new opportunities. Our mission focuses on integrating money movement with financial insights, empowering small businesses to manage cash flow more confidently. The Payments area represents one of Xero's key investment and growth sectors, handling how small businesses get paid, pay their employees, and pursue future growth. As Engineering Manager, you'll lead the Vancouver Payments Platform engineering team charged with building early-stage initiatives that underpin money movement across Xero and enable new global product lines such as worldwide bill payments. Your leadership will ensure consistent delivery while also shaping engineering practices and building team capabilities.

Technical Challenges

• Develop a shared payments platform offering orchestration, risk and fraud control, and multi-provider functionality usable across products and markets, accelerating new payment product launches without redundantly rebuilding core components.
• Create global bill payment systems that simplify complex financial workflows for small businesses while maintaining accuracy, security, and accounting integration.
• Architect highly reliable and secure distributed services capable of handling high throughput at scale under real-world operational constraints.
• Achieve immediate customer value alongside long-term architectural improvements by selectively rebuilding existing systems.
• Implement trustworthy AI capabilities addressing product challenges while safeguarding customer trust and rigorously governing AI evaluation and operations.

Your responsibility is to guide the team in balancing customer impact and strategic architecture advancement effectively.

Impact Milestones

• Within first 6 months: gain deep understanding of the payments platform, its consumers, and supported customer problems; establish production code delivery with an agreed roadmap for key capabilities such as onboarding or multi-provider support; institute robust on-call and code review practices; develop team capabilities through mentoring and technical oversight.
• Within first 12 months: oversee architectural decisions running in production that accelerate payment product rollouts; set engineering standards and clearly define ownership; deliver faster and safer payment experiences benefiting small businesses.

Ownership and Leadership

You will be accountable for delivering projects, managing team staffing and maintaining operational health of the Vancouver Payments engineering team. This includes recruitment, performance evaluation, and career progression for all engineers. You will collaborate with product and engineering leadership to set priorities and govern team processes, quality benchmarks, and on-call practices. Ownership of architectural decisions lies with technical leads, but you ensure these decisions are executable with appropriately skilled teams. You will help shape team processes, including the use of AI-assisted development while fostering a culture of individual accountability for work quality, reliability, and on-call responsibilities.

Collaboration

• Work with senior leaders such as Lili Kan, GM/VP Payments Platform Engineering, with extensive platform and payment intelligence experience at Stripe and Uber.
• Partner with Jing Feng, Head of Engineering, who brings leadership from Uber, Apple, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, especially in risk product engineering.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering highly available distributed systems under strict operational conditions.
• Skilled in managing, hiring, mentoring engineers and fostering inclusive, high-trust team environments.
• Experience developing platforms/products from concept to production and scaling them with increased complexity.
• Strong technical understanding of system architecture, API design, and data storage to guide design decisions.
• Ability to prioritize and decompose complex problems into actionable plans leading to tangible delivery.
• Comfortable leveraging AI tools in development workflows with critical evaluation of outcomes.

Desirable Skills

• Background in payments, fintech, or money movement including orchestration, risk, fraud, or multi-provider integrations.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems while continuously delivering customer value.
• Proven collaboration with cross-functional teams (product, design) to translate complex business requirements into resilient engineering solutions.

Working Approach

We pursue bold visions pragmatically, making incremental improvements rather than large rewrites. Investment in AI helps accelerate learning and focus on high-impact problems, while engineers remain accountable for delivery. We leverage shared frameworks to minimize redundant work and empower innovation. Engineers own quality, reliability, and operational readiness. Leadership provides context and priorities while encouraging engineer-driven solutions.

Work Location and Flexibility

This role is offered as an onsite position in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a hybrid work model that balances remote work flexibility and office collaboration, including designated boost days. Candidates across Canada interested in relocating to Vancouver are encouraged to apply.

Selection Process

• Initial 45-minute phone screen to discuss background, motivations, and role fit.
• Technical assessments including a systems design exercise based on realistic scenarios administered by an independent provider.
• Technical deep dive interview (45–60 minutes) with principal engineer and team reviewing a past leadership project.
• Values alignment session (45 minutes) covering adaptability, ownership, customer focus, and AI fluency.
• Leadership interview (45–60 minutes) assessing leadership and delivery in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.

Compensation & Benefits

Xero offers a total rewards philosophy recognizing your impact including base salary, performance incentives, and exceptional benefits.

• Salary range: CAD 188,000 to 236,000 annually, influenced by location, experience, and skill set.
• Eligibility for annual bonus and equity via Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Comprehensive benefits including health, wellness, retirement, wellbeing days, generous leave, and professional development budgets.

Additional Information

This is an open vacancy. AI tools assist in application screening but all hiring decisions involve human review.