Staff Software Engineer - API Gateway & Service Mesh

Intuit; Bloomington (IL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and build the core traffic infrastructure that powers our platform at scale, including API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, and Service Mesh.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives on solving complex distributed-systems problems, sets the technical bar for the team, and cares deeply about resiliency, latency, and operational excellence at high transaction volumes.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing and developing platform software backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude or Cursor or equivalent.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes fundamentals, including the control plane, clustering, Deployments, StatefulSets, and DaemonSets.
• Solid understanding of how Kubernetes controllers operate.
• Strong grasp of networking concepts and protocols including TCP, TLS, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and gRPC.
• Practical knowledge of Istio, how it works, how to configure it, its core features, and Envoy filters.
• Strong understanding of Envoy internals and configuration.
• Hands-on experience with AWS (or equivalent cloud), including Route 53, IAM, Transit Gateway, NAT Gateway, and managed data stores such as ElastiCache and DynamoDB.
• Strong programming proficiency in Go and Java.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop core Traffic Platform components, including the API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, and Service Mesh.
• Lead gathering of functional requirements, authoring technical specifications, and project and test planning across initiatives.
• Present designs and trade-offs to technical review forums and drive alignment with stakeholders.
• Manage priorities, deadlines, and deliverables across concurrent projects with minimal oversight.
• Define comprehensive test strategies, including positive and negative cases, to validate correctness and resiliency.
• Perform code reviews (Go, Python, Java) and provide actionable feedback to raise code quality.
• Debug complex distributed failures including tracing across Kubernetes clusters.
• Demonstrate operational excellence with observability, reliability, and incident readiness.
• Remain hands-on: contribute production-quality code and continuously improve existing solutions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Go

Java

Cloud infrastructure

Observability

Tools

Istio

Envoy

AWS

Envoy filters

Job description

Intuit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and build the core traffic infrastructure that powers our platform at scale, including API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, and Service Mesh.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives on solving complex distributed-systems problems, sets the technical bar for the team, and cares deeply about resiliency, latency, and operational excellence at high transaction volumes.