Senior Search Engineer

About the role

Join Xero's Search team as a Senior Search Engineer, working on one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. You will own both search‑specific and general engineering work, contributing to a multi‑year platform rebuild and ensuring high‑availability for millions of documents.

Key responsibilities

• Maintain and evolve a search cluster handling 50+ million documents and 400 TB of data, targeting 99.9% uptime.
• Lead projects and contribute to the Horizon 2 search platform rebuild, addressing critical infrastructure limits.
• Integrate the Operational Data Layer into the ingestion pipeline for the new platform.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, and platform teams across Melbourne, New South Wales and New Zealand.

Required profile

• Strong experience building, maintaining and scaling search systems in production.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals and ability to work on both search‑specific and general engineering tasks.
• Commitment to high code quality and thorough code reviews.
• Effective collaborator in distributed, cross‑functional teams.

Required skills

• Search engineering (design, scaling, performance tuning).
• Software development best practices and code quality standards.