Curriculum Vitae · 2026

Ryan McInteer

Engineering leader & builder · Xero since 2012

email[email protected]
linkedinRyan McInteer ↗
basedWellington, NZ

Summary

13 years at Xero as a developer, technical lead, principal engineer, and engineering manager. I've stayed close to the code while leading platform-critical modernisation, incident response, and cross-team delivery. I coach engineers through real design decisions and build independent products, including Hawkr, outside my day job.

Skills

Hands-on Technical LeadershipSoftware ArchitectureAI-Native EngineeringCoaching & MentoringIncident ResponseCross-Team DeliveryCloud ComputingProduct Engineering

Experience

Engineering Manager

Xero

Jul 2026 – Present

  • Lead a team building and maintaining foundational platform applications.
  • Set performance standards; hire and develop capability; and support predictable roadmap delivery and incident escalation.
  • Provide system design and technical direction, and lead AI-native SDLC workflows to increase velocity and reduce toil.

Lead Engineer

Xero

Sep 2024 – Jun 2026

  • AI Tooling: Built internal AI tools for engineers and helped my team adopt AI-assisted development in their day-to-day work.
  • Architecture: Helped shape the modernisation of long-lived platform systems, working through complex dependencies and securing alignment on a path forward.
  • Delivery: Led technical planning and cross-team coordination for major platform changes while keeping delivery moving through production incidents.
  • Coaching: Coached senior engineers through system design, architecture reviews, and technical leadership.
  • Incident Response: Led response to high-severity incidents, including hands-on debugging and durable fixes to recurring problems.

Principal Engineer

Xero

Jul 2022 – Sep 2024

  • Engineering strategy across Platform Engineering, including identity and organisation infrastructure.
  • Founded the Lead Engineer community across all pods in the division, growing it from fewer than 10 leads to 20+. Created a forum for cross-pod technical alignment and Lead Engineer development.
  • Cross-divisional alignment on platform capabilities.
  • Authored engineering requirements for multi-quarter initiatives.
  • Represented platform concerns in architecture review panels.

Lead Engineer

Xero

Apr 2021 – Jul 2022

  • Enablement-focused: built team capability, psychological safety, and coaching culture.
  • Advocated for sustainable delivery over velocity.

People Lead

Xero

Jul 2019 – May 2021

  • Formal people management. Grew the org to 13 direct reports by end of tenure.
  • Co-built the Platform Engineering career development framework.
  • Recruiting: hiring process design, interview standardisation, panellist training.

Team Lead, Platform Engineering

Xero

May 2018 – Jun 2019

  • Led a team of ~5 Software and Infrastructure Engineers delivering Xero's authentication platform.
  • Grew and recruited into the team, and managed stakeholders across dependent services.

Earlier at Xero · Software Developer

Xero

Nov 2012 – May 2018

  • Foundation member of a service-oriented architecture engineering team focused on security and authentication.
  • Contributed to Xero's cloud migration to AWS.
  • Platform-wide bug triage and remediation across services.

Independent work

Public work undertaken independently of Xero employment.

Guild & “Give your AI a home”

Independent public work on a persistent AI-agent operating model: identity, durable memory, witnessed work, and continuity across sessions.

Explore the architecture

Hawkr

Built a NZ thoroughbred form-study product spanning source-data ingestion and normalisation, a study interface, and a conversational analysis harness.

hawkr.co.nz