Staff Data Platform Engineer — Real-Time Data at Scale

Intuit; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 202,500 - 274,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuit in Mountain View, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Data to help design and scale the Consumer Data Plane by leveraging Credit Karma and Turbotax data. You will build data frameworks, pipelines, and services that power AI-native experiences and personalized product surfaces at scale.

You will own high-throughput data platforms, drive architecture decisions, and collaborate across teams to deliver reliable, secure data infrastructure with strong focus on developer experience and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and data infrastructure in Scala, Java, or a similar JVM language.
• 7+ years of experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that process data at petabyte scale.
• 3+ years of experience with streaming and messaging platforms such as Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or equivalent.
• 3+ years of experience building data pipelines on a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including services like Dataflow, BigQuery, Spanner, or their equivalents.
• Professional experience with RPC frameworks such as Finagle, gRPC, or Akka for building production-grade service-to-service communication.
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices including CI/CD, version control (Git), code review, and automated testing.
• Experience building reusable frameworks, SDKs, or platform libraries consumed by other engineering teams — you think about developer experience as a product.
• Experience with Apache Beam (Dataflow) including custom transforms, side inputs, windowing strategies, and pipeline optimization.
• Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC) patterns, particularly MySQL binlog-based replication to analytical stores.
• Experience with data encryption at rest and in transit, including key management (KMS/GSM), SPIFFE/mTLS, and certificate authority integration.
• Experience with schema management, data governance, data catalog, data quality and lineage management frameworks in a large-scale production environment.
• Knowledge of AI/ML and GenAI technologies — LLMs, RAG, Semantic Search and Knowledge Graph to integrate our data with generative AI experiences.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes (GKE), and container-based deployment models.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and driving technical alignment across teams through design documents and architecture reviews.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency data frameworks used across Credit Karma's engineering organization, including ETL templates, persistence libraries, and streaming data pipelines.
• Develop and extend Scala-based microservices and frameworks built on Finagle, Akka Streams, and gRPC that process petabytes of data daily.
• Build and optimize cloud-native data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform using Dataflow (Apache Beam), Flink, Spark, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Spanner.
• Own and evolve our Kafka-based streaming infrastructure — designing producers, consumers, and connectors that handle hundreds of terabytes of events per day with strict latency and durability guarantees.
• Build persistence frameworks that provide a unified, type-safe API for reading and writing across Spanner, MySQL, and BigQuery.
• Build agentic systems, semantic search, knowledge graph and personalization to disrupt how consumers do their taxes, money and personal finance using Consumer Data Plane.
• Design and implement encryption, decryption, and fine-grained access control capabilities as reusable framework features, ensuring compliance with data governance requirements.
• Create self-service developer tooling — CLI tools, templates, and onboarding automation — that reduces the time for other teams to adopt the data platform from weeks to hours.
• Drive technical design through architecture reviews and Technical Design Documents (TDDs), influencing decisions across the broader Data organization.
• Participate in on-call rotations and build observability (dashboards, alerting, metrics) into every system you ship.
• You will own foundational infrastructure — the frameworks you build are the building blocks that every data pipeline and product feature at Credit Karma depends on.
• You will work at real scale — hundreds of terabytes per day, millions of consumer profiles hydrated in real time, and strict SLAs that demand engineering rigor.
• You will shape developer experience — designing the APIs, SDKs, and tooling that hundreds of engineers across the company interact with daily.
• You will solve hard, novel problems — from building MySQL CDC pipelines with cloud-native encryption to designing Apache Beam framework SDKs that support both Java and Python.
• You will be part of a high-impact, collaborative team with a strong culture of technical ownership and continuous learning.

Skills

Scala/Java

Distributed systems

Microservices

CI/CD

Tools

Kafka

Pub/Sub

Dataflow

BigQuery

Spanner

gRPC

Finagle

Akka

Job description

Intuit in Mountain View, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Data to help design and scale the Consumer Data Plane by leveraging Credit Karma and Turbotax data. You will build data frameworks, pipelines, and services that power AI-native experiences and personalized product surfaces at scale.

You will own high-throughput data platforms, drive architecture decisions, and collaborate across teams to deliver reliable, secure data infrastructure with strong focus on developer experience and