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.
He was awarded the status of Fellow[2] in the American Physical Society,[3] after he was nominated by his Forum on International Physics in 2008,[4] for important contributions to the theoretical understanding of two-dimensional electron systems. He worked to foster collaboration between physicists in China and the United States, and co-organizing a number of important international workshops and conferences.
Xie served as Dean of the School of Physics at Peking University from 2011 to 2018. He was appointed Vice President of the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2018. He became President of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China in 2024.