Principal Engineer (API Platform)
$227,600–$284,600 year
HybridVancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Job Summary
Define and drive the long-term technical vision for Xero's external accounting APIs and internal platform services, shaping how millions of businesses and AI agents interact with the system. Design and steward the Supergraph model to consolidate technical stacks, while leading legacy burndown initiatives to replace back-channel endpoints with coherent, strongly-typed interfaces. Partner with product management, AI/ML teams, and engineering squads to ensure the platform remains reliable and an accelerator for developer ecosystems. This role is based in the Vancouver office under a hybrid working model.
Required Qualifications
- 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
- a genuine interest in developer experience
- Familiarity with event-driven architecture (webhooks, message queues, pub/sub patterns, and idempotent consumers)
- the ability to design for failure and recovery in these 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
- an 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
- from coaching individual engineers through to building communities of practice around platform and API thinking
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