Engineering Manager - Applied AI

The role and its impact

You will lead and grow the Internal AI Accelerator team as it expands from its current core to a fully formed engineering squad. You will own the strategy, delivery, and roadmap for how Xero designs and delivers agentic AI workflows that eliminate manual toil, speed up decision-making, and generate measurable productivity gains. This means working directly with business leaders across G&A, Finance, P&C, and IT functions to co-build reusable AI patterns and governance frameworks that last. You will shape how Xero thinks about AI delivery long after your tenure, building playbooks and reference architectures that other teams can pick up and run with.

What your engineers build goes into production and real people rely on it. One month you are partnering with finance, the next you are embedded in IT. You set the pace, you unblock the path, and you hold your team accountable to shipping.

The team and how they connect

The Internal AI Accelerator team is a small, high-impact crew of engineers embedded across Xero's business units. They partner directly with product, engineering, and business teams to design and ship AI workflows in weeks, not months. The team operates with a direct line to senior stakeholders and a genuine mandate to move fast. Together, you are genuinely curious about what works and what doesn't, learning openly from every project and sharing what you discover.

The team is currently working on

The team is expanding from a proof-of-concept phase into building at scale. You will focus on growing the engineering capability across multiple workstreams. Initially, your priorities will be:

Scaling agentic AI delivery across multiple business domains (finance, HR, support, operations)
Building reusable patterns, platforms, and governance frameworks that other teams can adopt
Designing and implementing the technical architecture for enterprise AI deployments
Establishing best practices for AI safety, evaluation, and operations at scale

Where and how you can work

This role is based in Sydney. You will work in a hybrid model with core collaboration days in the office. Xero supports flexible ways of working, and regular "boost days" bring our ANZ teams together for connection and planning.

Here are some of the things we are looking for

You bring solid engineering credibility, ideally from shipping production software at scale, so you can make sound technical decisions and earn your team's respect without needing to code day-to-day.
Your approach to strategy is pragmatic: you can move fast without all the answers, turning vague problems into clear scope, and pivoting when the situation changes.
You will Go Bold in how you lead: giving your team ownership, pushing back on processes that slow you down, and creating space for innovation alongside delivery.
You demonstrate genuine curiosity about your people and a commitment to coaching them up. You leave your team knowing more than when they joined.
You show comfort bridging technical and non-technical worlds, translating between engineers and business stakeholders without losing nuance on either side.

Apply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! At Xero, we hire based on your skills, passion, and the unique perspective you can bring to enhance our culture and team.