Principal Engineer (API Platform)

Xero•Vancouver, BC

1d•CA$227,600 - CA$284,600•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a senior individual contributor and technical leadership role at the heart of one of Xero’s most strategically important initiatives. As Principal Engineer for Platform API, you will define and drive the long-term technical vision for how Xero exposes its accounting capabilities to external partners (building on our platform) and to internal product teams who depend on a stable, well-designed API layer to move fast. The decisions you make here will shape how millions of small businesses and their advisors experience Xero, not just through our own products, but through the ecosystem of applications and agents built around them. Beyond the external surface, this role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and AI. The APIs you design and steward will serve as the trusted foundation for AI- and agent-driven automation across Xero’s accounting workflows; meaning you will be thinking not just about today’s developer experience, but about what it means for an LLM or autonomous agent to safely read, write, and orchestrate complex financial workflows. It is a rare opportunity to do genuinely consequential technical work at scale.

Requirements

A deep background in backend or platform engineering at scale, ideally in multi-tenant SaaS or distributed systems environments.
Strong proficiency in a modern language such as C#, Go, or Java.
Proven experience designing and evolving external-facing APIs and SDKs, including lifecycle practices such as versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility.
Familiarity with event-driven architecture (webhooks, message queues, pub/sub patterns, and idempotent consumers).
Ability to design for failure and recovery in event-driven systems.
A track record of leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives: shaping technical strategy, facilitating design reviews and RFCs, and aligning multiple stakeholders without losing momentum.
Exposure to LLM- or ML-powered products, agentic architectures, or AI safety and governance concerns.
Understanding of how API and event design decisions affect model quality, safety, and reliability.
A genuine approach to mentoring and growing engineering capability in others.

Nice To Haves

Genuine interest in developer experience.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technical vision for how Xero exposes its accounting capabilities to external partners and internal product teams.
Design and steward APIs that serve as the foundation for AI- and agent-driven automation.
Partner closely with product management, AI/ML teams, developer relations, and engineering squads to ensure the platform is coherent, reliable, and an accelerator.
Shape technical direction within the team and across Xero’s broader engineering community.
Deliver across core accounting domains using the Supergraph model to consolidate the technical stack and developer experience.
Help replace or front expensive back-channel endpoints with coherent, strongly-typed interfaces and stable contracts.
Mentor and grow engineering capability in others, from coaching individual engineers to building communities of practice around platform and API thinking.