Staff Software Engineer

Intuit, Inc.; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 203,000 - 274,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuit, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead scalable, high-availability systems powering payroll and workforce experiences. You will design, code, and mentor across distributed services while shaping AI agentic workflows and secure tool integrations for production use.

The role emphasizes practical engineering leadership, collaboration with product/design/data science, and driving reliability, monitoring, and performance at scale.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years building systems and services in large-scale environments (Java, Spring Boot).
• 5+ years designing and operating robust, scalable distributed systems.
• Strong command of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, idempotency, concurrency.
• Experience with microservices, REST, GraphQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS.
• Hands-on AI/ML-powered features to production, including LLM-based apps.
• Experience designing agentic systems with tool and API integration.
• Proven leadership and communication skills for design reviews and cross-team collaboration.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and move quickly with influence.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of high-volume, high-availability services with strict latency and correctness.
• Design for correctness at scale: idempotency, data consistency, retries, and safe recovery.
• Drive event-driven and workflow-based architectures across distributed services.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and resiliency engineering (multi-region).
• Raise the operational bar via observability, SLOs, alerting, and incident prevention.
• Design and ship agentic workflows; build tool-calling interfaces for AI assistants.
• Define guardrails for agents handling sensitive data and human-in-the-loop checks.
• Partner with data science to bring ML capabilities into production.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and communicate trade-offs to partners.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Distributed systems

React/JavaScript

Leadership

Communication

Mentoring

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Tools

REST

GraphQL

Kafka

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Come join the QuickBooks Workforce Solutions engineering team at Intuit as a Staff Software Engineer. Our platforms power payroll and workforce experiences for millions of small businesses and the people who work for them, and they have to be fast, reliable, and correct at every scale.

We are looking for an engineer who has designed and operated large-scale, highly available distributed systems, and who has built real AI/ML and agentic experiences in production, not just experimented with them. You will shape the technical direction of how our platform scales and how AI agents safely automate workflows for customers and internal teams, and you will help expose our capabilities to Intuit's AI assistants and partner agent platforms.

Intuit acts as a 35-year-old startup, constantly disrupting ourselves to deliver on our mission to power prosperity around the world. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will write code, design systems, mentor engineers, and partner closely with product, design, and data science.

Responsibilities

Scalable system design

• Own the architecture of high-volume, high-availability services that handle peak loads with strict correctness, reliability, and latency requirements.
• Design for correctness at scale: idempotency, data consistency, retries, and safe failure and recovery modes.
• Drive event-driven and workflow-based architectures (Kafka, state machines, sagas) across distributed services.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and resiliency engineering (multi-region, graceful degradation, load shedding).
• Raise the operational bar through observability, SLOs, alerting, and incident prevention.

AI/ML and agentic experiences

• Design and ship agentic workflows that automate complex, multi-step tasks for customers and operations teams.
• Build the tool and API layer (for example, MCP servers and tool-calling interfaces) that lets LLM-based assistants securely read and act on product data.
• Define guardrails for agents acting on sensitive data: authorization, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, policy enforcement, and auditability.
• Establish evaluation, testing, and monitoring practices for LLM and agent behavior (offline evals, golden datasets, regression suites, production quality metrics), and partner with Responsible AI on review.
• Partner with data science to bring ML capabilities such as prediction, anomaly detection, and personalization into production.
• Use GenAI tools to accelerate engineering across the team, and build reusable components other teams can adopt.

Technical leadership

• Spend roughly 60-80% of your time hands-on: designing, coding, and reviewing.
• Lead functional requirements, technical specifications, and test planning for major initiatives; accurately scope effort, identify risks, and communicate trade-offs.
• Act as the technical go-to person for your area; diagnose and resolve complex, cross-system production issues.
• Mentor engineers on technology, design, and operational excellence, and raise the team's skill in distributed systems and applied AI.
• Influence product and technology direction with data; communicate clearly with senior product and business partners.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years of experience building systems and services for large-scale business environments (Java, Spring Boot); full-stack experience with React/JavaScript is a plus.
• 5+ years designing, building, and operating robust, highly scalable, highly available distributed systems; you can walk through systems you designed, the scale they handled, and the trade-offs you made.
• Strong command of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, idempotency, concurrency, partitioning, caching, and failure handling.
• Practical experience with microservices and messaging technologies (REST, GraphQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS).
• Strong database design experience across SQL (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, Cassandra).
• Hands-on experience building and shipping AI/ML-powered features to production, including LLM-based applications (prompting, RAG, tool/function calling).
• Experience designing agentic systems: multi-step agent workflows, tool and API integration (MCP or similar), orchestration, and guardrails.
• Experience evaluating AI systems in production: eval design, quality and safety metrics, and iterating on model and agent behavior.
• Expertise in data structures, algorithms, software design, and architecture.
• Strong leadership and communication skills: leading design reviews, presenting, and explaining complex technical issues to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, parachuting into new areas, and driving impact quickly with a Discover-Implement-Ship-Measure-Learn mindset.

Preferred

• Experience with fintech, payments, or other high-correctness, compliance-sensitive domains.
• Experience applying AI agents to operational workflows (support, operations, exception handling) with measurable efficiency outcomes.
• Experience with workflow engines (Temporal, Step Functions, or similar).

Intuit provides a competitive compensation package with a strong pay for performance rewards approach. This position may be eligible for a cash bonus, equity rewards and benefits, in accordance with our applicable plans and programs (see more about our compensation and benefits at Intuit®: Careers | Benefits). Pay offered is based on factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and work location. To drive ongoing fair pay for employees, Intuit conducts regular comparisons across categories of ethnicity and gender.

Mountain View $202,500 - $274,000