Senior Search Engineer

Role and Impact

This position is for a specialist in search technologies eager to operate at significant scale. As a Senior Engineer on Xero's Search team, you will oversee and develop one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. This cluster forms part of a comprehensive vertical stack delivered to customers. The role offers challenging and meaningful work by managing hundreds of millions of searchable documents worldwide, maintaining nearly 99.9% uptime, and contributing to a major platform redevelopment that will drive Xero's next phase of growth.

Responsibilities and Ownership

This role demands true ownership of systems. You will engage in both search-focused and broader engineering tasks, oversee and evaluate code through pull requests, and lead various projects. A passion for high-quality solutions and enthusiasm for tackling challenging problems at scale are essential.

Team Collaboration

The Search team is a close-knit group based across Melbourne, New South Wales, and New Zealand. You'll cooperate closely with teammates designing the ingestion layer of the platform, a dedicated Product Manager, and the Catalyst Platform team that manages service updates and deployments. The team values quality and teamwork in resolving complex technical challenges.

Current Initiatives

• Undertaking a multi-year overhaul of a large-scale search platform integral to Xero's infrastructure, processing hundreds of millions of documents globally.
• Ensuring continuous operation and enhancement of the search cluster to maintain 99.9% uptime.
• Collaborating with the ODL team on the ingestion pipeline for the revamped platform.
• Developing future-oriented capabilities focused on data and AI-related search functionalities.

Work Location and Flexibility

This role can be based in Australia or New Zealand with considerable flexibility for daily work location. The team convenes in Melbourne roughly biannually to foster alignment and in-person interaction. Additionally, Xero offers "boost days" allowing optional office presence to collaborate with the wider company network.

Candidate Profile

• You possess considerable experience in search engineering, including building, maintaining, and scaling search systems in live environments.
• You have solid software development skills and can contribute beyond search-specific tasks to general engineering duties.
• You prioritize outstanding code quality and maintain high standards for the work you produce and review.
• Working collaboratively with diverse teams across distributed locations comes naturally to you.
• Exposure to data science or AI tooling is advantageous but not mandatory.