After receiving his doctorate, Xie worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington and the University of Maryland. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Oklahoma State University, where he became a full professor in 2001. He returned to China in 2005 and became a professor at the Institute of Physics, CAS, where he served as director of the Laboratory of Condensed Matter Theory and Computational Materials Physics. He has been a professor at Peking University since 2009.