Staff Software Engineer - Service Mesh/API gateway

Intuit; Des Moines (IA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Intuit in Des Moines, IA seeks a Staff Software Engineer to design and build the core traffic infrastructure powering our platform at scale, including the API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, and Service Mesh. This hands-on technical leadership role focuses on resiliency, latency, and operational excellence in high-volume environments.

You will contribute production-grade Go and Java code, lead architectural decisions, and drive initiatives across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing and building backend services and distributed systems at scale.
• Strong Kubernetes expertise and experience operating cloud infrastructure.
• Proficiency in Go and Java; knowledge of Python is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core Traffic Platform components (API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, Service Mesh).
• Lead requirements, write technical specs, and plan projects with stakeholders.
• Present designs and trade-offs in reviews and drive alignment.
• Manage priorities and deliverables across concurrent projects with minimal oversight.
• Define test strategies to validate correctness and resiliency, including negative scenarios.
• Review code and provide actionable feedback to improve code quality across Go, Python, and Java.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Go

Java

AI tooling

Networking

Tools

Envoy

Istio

AWS

Job description

Overview

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help design and build the core traffic infrastructure that powers our platform at scale including our 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.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop core Traffic Platform components, including the API Gateway, MCP Gateway, AI Gateway, and Service Mesh.
• Lead the gathering of functional requirements, authoring of technical specifications, and project and test planning across initiatives.
• Present designs, architectural decisions, and their 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 both positive and negative cases, to validate correctness and resiliency of solutions.
• Perform code reviews (primarily Go, Python, and Java) and provide clear, actionable feedback that raises the quality of the codebase.
• Debug complex, distributed failures including tracing transactions that traverse multiple Kubernetes clusters before reaching the destination service.
• Demonstrate a strong operational excellence mindset, with attention to observability, reliability, and incident readiness.
• Remain hands-on: contribute production-quality code and continuously improve existing solutions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing and developing platform software backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure operating at scale on Kubernetes with Istio/Envoy
• 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 how to author Envoy filters.
• Strong understanding of Envoy internals and configuration.
• Hands-on experience with AWS (or an equivalent cloud), including Route 53, IAM, Transit Gateway, NAT Gateway, and managed data stores such as ElastiCache and DynamoDB.
• Strong programming proficiency in Go-lang and Java.

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.