Staff Software Engineer - Systems

Overview

As a Staff Systems Engineer, you will be a key technical leader in the transformation of the TurboTax platform. Your primary mission will be to design, implement, and drive the adoption of modern, scalable, and resilient systems architectures. This role is central to our effort to decouple the current monolithic application into a suite of independently deployable microservices and to significantly upgrade the core Tax Engine. You will bridge the gap between development and operations, ensuring our modern systems are not only robust and performant but also highly available, observable, and cost-efficient in a cloud-native environment.

Responsibilities

The Staff Systems Engineer will be responsible for the following key areas:

Architectural Leadership & Design

• Design and architect the migration from the existing monolith to a high-scale, distributed microservices architecture.
• Lead the planning and implementation of the Tax Engine modernization effort, focusing on performance, scalability, and modularity.
• Define and enforce system-level standards for latency, throughput, reliability, and security across all new services.
• Evaluate, select, and champion appropriate cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, serverless, modern messaging systems) to support the new architecture.
  
  

Implementation & Engineering

• Write, review, and maintain high-quality, high-performance, and resilient infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and system configuration code.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines that facilitate rapid, reliable, and automated deployment and rollback of microservices.
• Implement and manage observability tools (monitoring, logging, tracing) to provide deep insights into the health and performance of the distributed system.
  
  

Reliability & Operations

• Establish and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for critical TurboTax services.
• Lead efforts to improve system reliability and stability, focusing on incident reduction through root cause analysis and proactive engineering solutions.
• Drive performance tuning and capacity planning for the modern architecture, ensuring optimal resource utilization and cost efficiency.
  
  

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Act as a subject matter expert (SME), providing technical guidance and mentoring to engineering teams on distributed systems design, best practices, and SRE principles.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, security teams, and engineering leaders to align system strategy with business goals.
  
  

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering (SRE).
• Deep expertise in cloud computing platforms (AWS), including hands-on experience with core networking, compute, and data services.
• Proven track record of designing and implementing large-scale distributed systems, including successful experience breaking down monolithic applications into microservices.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, specifically Kubernetes (e.g., EKS, GKE).
• Strong proficiency in a major programming language (e.g., Go, Java, Python) with a focus on writing systems-level or high-performance code.
• Solid understanding of database technologies (SQL, NoSQL) and data migration strategies in a modernized architecture.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Familiarity with the challenges and solutions in the FinTech or high-compliance regulated domains.
  
  

Intuit provides a competitive compensation package with a strong pay for performance rewards approach. This position will 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.

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