Principal Full Stack / Frontend Engineer

Salary: Competitive Salary + Healthcare + Hybrid

XE | Auckland or Christchurch | Hybrid

XE are growing their New Zealand technology team and are looking for a Principal Engineer to help shape the future of their global payments and foreign exchange platforms.

This role is likely to suit a principal-level engineer with strong full stack capability or a frontend-leaning technical leader who has worked deeply across modern web platforms, architecture, product engineering, and complex production systems.

XE helps consumers and businesses collect, convert, hold, and send money across international markets. Backed by Euronet Worldwide, XE has the scale of a global financial services group, while the New Zealand engineering team remains small enough for senior technical people to have real influence and visibility.

The role

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to stay hands-on while setting technical direction across complex product and platform work.

You will not be stepping into a traditional people management role. Instead, you’ll lead through technical judgement, influence, design review, mentoring, standards, and hands-on contribution to critical work.

XE is rebuilding and modernising the platform layer behind its corporate and consumer payments products. The New Zealand team is expanding as part of a broader global technology growth plan, and this role will play a key part in helping teams make strong technical decisions across frontend, backend, cloud, data, reliability, and platform modernisation.

The role could suit either a genuinely full stack principal engineer or someone with particularly strong frontend architecture capability who can still work effectively across the broader engineering environment.

AI-assisted engineering

XE is already using AI-assisted development tools across the engineering team, and this role needs someone who can help shape how those tools are used well.

You should be comfortable using tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code or similar across development, testing, refactoring, documentation, technical investigation, and design work.

Just as importantly, you should be able to help other engineers use these tools responsibly, without lowering the bar on quality, security, maintainability, or engineering discipline.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll be involved in:

• Setting technical direction across complex, high-impact engineering work

• Anchoring ambiguous technical problems and turning them into clear, shippable plans

• Working across squads to improve consistency, standards, and technical decision-making

• Staying hands-on with production code where senior judgement is most needed

• Contributing across frontend, backend, services, cloud, databases, and platform modernisation

• Helping teams build systems that support payments, FX, onboarding, settlement, KYC/KYB, and multi-currency services

• Leading design reviews and raising the quality of technical decisions

• Mentoring and supporting engineers without taking on formal people management responsibilities

• Partnering with product, design, compliance, architects, tech leads, and engineering leadership

• Supporting production reliability, observability, incident response, and modern deployment practices

• Helping shape how XE adopts AI-assisted engineering across the software development lifecycle

What we’re looking for

You do not need to tick every box, but you will likely bring:

• Principal-level software engineering experience in production environments

• Strong frontend experience with Vue.js, React, TypeScript, or similar modern web technologies

• Strong full stack capability, or deep frontend architecture experience with enough backend understanding to influence across the stack

• Backend experience with C#/.NET or another object-oriented language such as Java, Kotlin, or Go

• Strong SQL and relational database fundamentals

• Deep system design and architecture experience

• Experience with service-oriented, microservices, or event-driven systems

• Exposure to AWS and modern cloud deployment practices

• Experience setting technical direction across teams or domains

• A track record of mentoring engineers and lifting engineering standards

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders

• A practical, quality-focused approach to AI-assisted development

Experience in payments, foreign exchange, banking, fintech, insurance, or another regulated environment would be valuable. The environment is complex, so experience with regulated systems, financial workflows, or high-reliability platforms would be useful.

Why this role is worth considering

This is a strong opportunity for a principal-level engineer who wants:

• A senior individual contributor role, not a people management track

• Complex platform and product problems with real business impact

• The chance to influence engineering standards across squads

• A global financial technology environment from New Zealand

• A modern AI-assisted development environment

• A role where technical judgement, mentorship, and hands-on delivery all matter

• Flexibility for either full stack or frontend-leaning principal-level strengths

Working arrangement

This role can be based from either XE’s Auckland or Christchurch office, with a hybrid working model.

You’ll work with local colleagues as well as global teams across XE’s wider technology function. Because XE operates internationally, there may occasionally be calls or collaboration with teams in other regions.

Benefits

XE offers:

• Competitive salary

• KiwiSaver employer contributions on top of salary

• Healthcare

• Birthday day off

• Extra annual leave for each year of service, up to five additional days

• Discounted Euronet Employee Share Purchase Plan

• Volunteering day for a charity of your choice

• Office fruit, snacks, drinks, and coffee

• Mental health and wellbeing resources through Plumm

Interested?

If you are a principal-level engineer who wants to stay close to the code while shaping technical direction across a global payments platform, this is a strong opportunity to explore.