{"id":193214,"url":"https://alion.io/job/xero-senior-machine-learning-engineer","title":"Senior Engineer - ML & AI Systems","company":{"id":5206,"name":"Xero","domain":"xero.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/xero","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0.053,"stale_share":0.474,"repost_share":0.053,"time_to_fill_p50_days":33,"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Sydney, Australia","Melbourne, Australia"],"countries":["AU"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":110000,"max_usd":249000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":103},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Xero","optional":false},{"name":"Dask","optional":true},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"Spark","optional":true},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T22:19:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T14:51:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":64,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":64},"description":"The role\nYou will design, build and own the production systems behind Xero’s AI features: the services, pipelines and infrastructure that power LLM-driven and agentic experiences for millions of small businesses every day. This is a software engineering role. You’ll build and operate systems rather than train or tune models, and your architecture decisions will directly shape scale, cost, reliability and how fast our teams ship.\nYou don’t need a machine learning background. We’re looking for strong production engineers, ideally with experience building LLM or agentic systems, and ML depth can be learned on the team.\nBeyond architecture, you’ll lift engineering capability across AI Products by setting standards, mentoring engineers and partnering across Xero to make data usable and systems dependable.\nThe team\nYou’ll join AI Products, a diverse, globally distributed team of scientists, engineers, product managers and analysts within our broader Data & AI business.\nEngineers here partner closely with Applied Scientists early on to build the interfaces and harnesses that take models into production. They then own the engineering and infrastructure of every ML and AI system shipped into production, from reliability and cost to scale. Together, this collaborative team reduces toil and delivers reliable, intelligent experiences for small businesses.\nThe team is currently working on\nProduction ML and AI engineering: Building and operating the platforms, services and practices that support traditional ML models, generative AI and agentic systems in production.\n\nJAX (Just Ask Xero): Powering Xero's conversational GenAI assistant and evolving the underlying capabilities to support increasingly sophisticated, context-aware and agentic experiences.\n\nIntelligent financial workflows: Developing capabilities such as Automated Bank Reconciliation and smart document capture, using ML and AI to match transactions, extract information from bills and receipts, and automate complex tasks.\n\nXeroForce: Building the platform for AI-powered workflows, enabling agents to plan and execute complex tasks across Xero’s products and supporting reliable, reusable agentic experiences at scale.\n\nEnd-to-end AI product experiences: Integrating AI into customer-facing experiences and product workflows, alongside the backend services, orchestration and infrastructure that make them work.\n\nWhere and how you can work\nXero offers a flexible hybrid working model designed to blend the collaboration of office life with the autonomy of remote work. You will have access to our modern office spaces, with expectations around office days and collaborative 'boost days' aligned to help your team connect and ship great code effectively.\nHere are some of the things we are looking for\nA track record of designing, shipping and operating production-grade backend systems at scale\n\nExperience building and operating production systems for LLM or agentic workloads (orchestration, tool use, evaluation, guardrails, latency and cost management)\n\nStrong system design fundamentals and excellent coding in Python, or another language suited to web-scale services (Go, Java, Kotlin, TypeScript)\n\nExperience with APIs and service design, cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), CI/CD and observability, with a focus on latency, cost, reliability and SLOs\n\nExperience running services in production, including on-call and incident response\n\nSolid SQL and experience with large-scale data processing\n\nExcellent communication, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to business and technical audiences\n\nA coaching mindset and the ability to set engineering standards and mentor other engineers\n\nNice to have\nExperience operationalizing ML or LLM workloads (inference serving, evaluation pipelines)\n\nFamiliarity with MLflow, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and data orchestration tools\n\nDistributed processing experience (Spark, Dask)\n\nApply even if your experience isn't a perfect match! 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