Staff Software Engineer - Traffic

Intuit's Traffic Team sits at the center of every request that moves through Intuit's digital ecosystem. The team owns a custom-built API Gateway that handles all North-South traffic across Intuit's products, and a Service Mesh that governs East-West traffic between internal services.

As a central platform team, the reliability, security, and performance of this team's systems have a direct and immediate blast radius across every consumer-facing and internal Intuit service — an outage or regression here does not stay contained to one product, it cascades.

We are hiring a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership across this platform, with particular focus on two of the team's highest-leverage, fastest-moving initiatives: the MCP Gateway (the transitional and target-state authentication and routing layer that lets AI agents such as Claude securely interact with Intuit services) and the broader shift toward AI-agent-driven traffic operations — including agent-assisted troubleshooting, config impact analysis, and automated service onboarding.

This role requires someone equally comfortable operating at the depth of Envoy/Istio internals and at the altitude of a multi-quarter platform roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a senior technical leader for the Traffic platform, setting architecture and engineering direction across API Gateway, Service Mesh, and MCP Gateway with a systems-wide view of how they interact.
• Drive the technical design and hardening of the MCP Gateway, including authentication flows for AI agent clients, performance and security readiness, and the path from transitional to target-state architecture.
• Lead or heavily influence AI-agent-enabled traffic operations work — agent-driven troubleshooting, automated config impact analysis, and service onboarding — as part of the team's recurring delivery cadence.
• Own or co-own major migrations (e.g., Envoy adoption, Java-to-Go transitions, ICGW/3X consolidation) end-to-end, from design through rollout, with explicit attention to backward compatibility and blast-radius containment given the platform's central role.
• Apply and evolve resiliency practices — FMEA, Game Day exercises, load shedding — to reduce the frequency and severity of P1/P2 incidents on shared infrastructure.
• Act as a technical escalation point during high-severity incidents affecting gateway or mesh traffic, driving root-cause analysis and durable fixes (not just mitigation).
• Partner cross-functionally with adjacent Principal Engineers and engineering managers across Gateway, Mesh, MCP/3X, and Resiliency to align technical strategy across the org.
• Mentor senior and staff-track engineers, and raise the technical bar across the team through design reviews, and hands-on pairing on the hardest problems.
• Contribute to FY roadmap planning, providing grounded technical input on scope, sequencing, and risk trade-offs (e.g., what is realistic to land in a given quarter given platform constraints).

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems in production.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Envoy and/or Istio, or equivalent experience with modern service mesh and API gateway architectures (xDS APIs, sidecar/ambient models, traffic routing and policy enforcement).
• Strong systems-level programming ability in Go and/or Java, with experience migrating or operating hybrid-language platforms at scale.
• Demonstrated experience designing authentication/authorization systems for high-throughput, security-sensitive traffic — bonus for experience with agent-to-service or machine-to-machine auth patterns (OAuth, mTLS, token exchange).
• Track record of leading incident response and root-cause analysis for P1-level production issues on infrastructure with broad organizational impact.
• Experience with AWS networking and infrastructure (VPC, NAT/TGW, load balancing) and cost/performance trade-offs at scale.
• Proven ability to operate as a technical leader without direct reports — influencing through design docs, architecture reviews, and cross-team alignment rather than authority.

Preferred

• Direct experience building or operating infrastructure for AI agent traffic — MCP (Model Context Protocol), LLM gateway patterns, or similar emerging agent-to-service protocols.
• Experience with eBPF-based traffic capture or observability tooling.
• Familiarity with WASM or Go-based Envoy extension development.
• Background in FMEA methodology, chaos engineering, or Game Day-style resiliency practices.
• Experience operating within a platform team whose systems sit on the critical path for many downstream teams, with the discipline that entails (rigorous rollout gating, backward compatibility, staged enforcement).

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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.

The expected base pay range for this position is

San Diego $188,500 - $255,000

Mountain View, CA $202,500- $274,000