Principal Engineer

Xe is a cross-border payments platform. We help SMEs and consumers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand collect, convert, hold, and send money across markets. Each year, over 300 million people use Xe for currency information and over 350,000 use us to send money overseas. Today, we're rebuilding the platform layer behind cross-border payments for corporate and consumer clients.

We're hiring a Principal Engineer, a senior individual contributor who anchors complex, high-impact work across the stack and sets the technical direction others build around. You stay hands‑on, bring the engineers around you up with you, and lead through technical judgment rather than authority over people. You already use AI as part of how you think, build, test, and ship, and shape how the team does the same. You'll write code that moves money in production, anchor the engineering on complex, high-impact, and open-ended problems, and set the technical direction other engineers build around as Xe rebuilds its platform layer.

You work across squads as a force multiplier: raising the bar through design review and mentorship, going deep where your judgment is needed, and bringing other engineers up as you go, while still shipping on the critical path. This is an individual‑contributor role: you lead through technical authority and influence, not by managing people, and you partner with team leads, architects, and engineering managers who own team delivery and the people.

What You'll Do

• Anchor the engineering on complex, high-impact, and open-ended problems across the stack, setting the technical approach other engineers build around.
• Set technical direction and own the consistency and standards the platform depends on across squads.
• Act as a force multiplier: raise the level of the engineers around you through design review, mentorship, sponsorship, and how the team adopts AI, without managing them.
• Stay hands‑on, shipping production code on the critical path and the parts that most need senior judgment.
• Partner with product, design, compliance, and engineering leadership to turn ambiguous goals into clear, shippable technical plans.
• Use agentic coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) daily across the SDLC, and lead modernization from legacy services into the modern stack alongside architects and team leads.

What We're Looking For

• Must-have 8+ years building production software across the full stack, end-to-end.
• Strong frontend proficiency with Vue.js, React, or equivalent.
• Strong backend proficiency in C# / .NET preferred; other OOP languages welcome (Java, Kotlin, Go, or equivalent).
• Frontend fundamentals: responsive design, accessibility, web performance, and internationalization.
• Solid SQL and relational database fundamentals.
• Deep system design and architecture experience, including service-oriented or microservices and event-driven patterns.
• Track record anchoring large, ambiguous, cross-team technical efforts as an individual contributor: setting the technical direction other engineers build around, with impact measured by the engineers and teams you raise, not by personal output.
• Experience mentoring and growing engineers through design review, technical guidance, and sponsorship, without managing them.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) across the SDLC, and a clear point of view on how an engineering team should adopt AI.
• Production experience on AWS, including hands-on deployment, CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment practices, and native services such as SQS, DynamoDB, S3, ECS, and Lambda.
• Payments, FX, or regulated-industry experience.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to align engineers and stakeholders around a technical direction.

Nice-to-have

• Experience leading platform modernization or large migrations.
• Experience setting engineering standards or technical strategy adopted across teams.
• Experience with caching solutions like Memcached or Redis.
• Experience using project management and documentation tools like Jira and Confluence.
• Writing automated tests alongside development with AI tools (Claude Code or equivalent).