Search Engineer

Join Xero's Search team as a Search Engineer and help maintain and evolve one of the largest search clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. You'll work on infrastructure that powers Xero for 200,000+ daily active users, handling 50+ million searchable documents and 400TB of data at 99.9% uptime.

In this role, you'll grow your search engineering skills while contributing to meaningful projects. You'll work on both search-specific and generalist engineering tasks, collaborate with experienced engineers through code reviews, and gradually take on larger responsibilities as you develop expertise.

You'll be part of a small, tight-knit distributed team across Melbourne, New South Wales, and New Zealand, now part of Xero's Catalyst platform division. The team works collaboratively with a Product Manager, a Principal Architect, and the broader Catalyst Platform team. This is a great environment to learn search engineering at scale whilst working alongside senior engineers and technical leaders.

Horizon 2 platform rebuild - Contribute to a four-year search platform modernisation project

Cluster maintenance and evolution - Help maintain our search infrastructure at 99.9% uptime across massive scale

Operational Data Layer (ODL) integration - Work on ingestion pipeline integration with the new platform

Exploring new partnerships - Collaborate on integrations with Mobile, Files, and AI-adjacent search capabilities

Work remotely within Australia or New Zealand or hybrid from one of our offices. The team gathers in Melbourne approximately every six months for in-person collaboration, and there are optional "boost days" for office work when you'd like to connect with colleagues face-to-face.

Search engineering experience - You've built or maintained search systems and are keen to deepen your expertise in this domain

Solid software engineering fundamentals - You understand core software engineering principles and write clean, maintainable code

Growth mindset - You're eager to learn from experienced engineers and tackle increasingly complex problems

Collaboration skills - You work well with others across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams in a distributed environment

Initiative and ownership - You take on tasks with enthusiasm and aren't afraid to ask questions when you need support