Senior Search Engineer

Role Overview and Impact

This opportunity is designed for a specialist in search technology eager to operate at a substantial scale. As a Senior Engineer within Xero's Search team, you will be responsible for maintaining and advancing one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere—delivering a comprehensive vertical stack directly to customers. The role involves significant technical challenges such as managing hundreds of millions of searchable documents globally with a 99.9% uptime, alongside participating in a major platform rebuild set to drive Xero's forthcoming growth.

Responsibilities and Collaboration

This position emphasizes genuine ownership where you will engage in both search-centered and broader engineering tasks, contribute code reviews, lead projects, and uphold high-quality standards. You will work closely with a compact, interconnected team located across Melbourne, New South Wales, and New Zealand. The team partners with the ingestion layer developers, a dedicated Product Manager, and the Catalyst Platform team coordinating cross-service changes and releases, collectively approaching challenges with a quality-focused mindset.

Current Team Initiatives

• Leading a large-scale search platform reinvention—a multiyear infrastructure project managing hundreds of millions of documents worldwide.
• Ensuring the search cluster maintains and evolves to achieve 99.9% uptime reliability.
• Collaborating with the Operational Data Layer team on constructing the new platform's ingestion pipeline.
• Developing future capabilities in data and AI-related search technologies as part of ongoing platform evolution.

Work Environment and Flexibility

The role is based in Australia or New Zealand with authentic flexibility in daily work location. The team convenes in Melbourne biannually for alignment and team-building. Additionally, Xero provides boost days allowing employees to work from the office and engage with the wider organization as preferred.

Candidate Profile

• Extensive experience in search engineering, including building, maintaining, and scaling search systems within production settings.
• Strong foundation in software engineering and development, comfortable contributing to both specialized and general engineering assignments.
• A commitment to quality, consistently producing and reviewing high-standard code and processes.
• Natural inclination towards collaborative work with engineering, product, and infrastructure partners within a distributed team environment.
• Experience with data or AI tools is advantageous but not mandatory.