Staff Software Engineer

Overview Intuit is the global financial technology platform that powers prosperity for the people and communities we serve. Within Workforce Solutions, our Human Capital Management charter builds the products that help small and mid-market businesses hire, pay, and support their people. These are systems customers depend on to run payroll correctly, stay compliant across jurisdictions, and handle the daily work of managing a workforce without friction. We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction across multiple engineering teams in the HCM charter. This is a charter-wide role. You will not be measured by the features you personally ship, but by the quality of the architecture, standards, and technical decisions that hold across teams, and by the leverage you create for the engineers around you. You will identify the highest-consequence technical problems in HCM, build alignment on how to solve them, and drive them to resolution across organizational boundaries. The work is architecturally demanding. HCM spans a modern React front end and a large surface of cloud-native backend services, sitting on business logic that must be exactly right: calculation and eligibility rules, auditable compliance behavior across jurisdictions, and integration contracts with adjacent systems across the workforce stack. Much of it is mid-modernization. A significant part of this role is deciding what to rebuild, what to strangle, what to leave alone, and in what order, then making those calls stick. This role carries explicit accountability for our AI engineering direction. On the product side, you will own the architecture for how HCM builds AI-powered and agentic experiences: the shared patterns, the evaluation infrastructure, the guardrails, and the judgment about where non-deterministic systems belong and where they emphatically do not. On the practice side, you are expected to materially raise how the entire charter engineers with AI, moving the org from individual experimentation to a coherent, high-quality, measurable way of working. We are looking for someone who is already operating at the frontier here and can bring an organization with them. Staff engineers at Intuit lead without authority. You will influence roadmap, unblock teams, mentor senior engineers, and represent HCM technical strategy to senior engineering and product leadership. Responsibilities Technical strategy and architecture Own architectural direction for a significant portion of the HCM charter, spanning multiple teams and servicesIdentify the technical problems that most constrain the charter's velocity, reliability, or customer experience, and drive them to resolutionAuthor and shepherd technical strategy documents and architecture decision records that teams actually build againstDefine integration contracts and service boundaries across HCM and with adjacent Workforce Solutions platformsLead modernization and re-platforming strategy: sequencing, migration paths, and risk management, while keeping systems runningMake and defend consequential tradeoff decisions with incomplete information, and revisit them openly when the data changes AI architecture and practice Own the architecture for how HCM builds AI-powered and agentic product capabilities, including shared services, context and retrieval patterns, orchestration, and reuse across teamsEstablish the evaluation and quality infrastructure for non-deterministic systems: offline and online evals, regression suites, guardrails, fallback behavior, cost and latency budgets, and observabilitySet the boundary conditions for responsible AI use in compliance-sensitive paths, where a wrong answer has legal and financial consequences for a customerRaise the charter's AI engineering practice measurably: establish patterns, build or select internal tooling, run the forums, and move engineers from ad hoc use to a consistent high-quality workflowStay ahead of a fast-moving capability landscape and translate genuinely useful advances into concrete architectural and workflow changes, while filtering out what is not yet real Leverage and influence Multiply the output of engineers across multiple teams through design review, technical mentorship, and unblocking hard problemsMentor senior and staff-track engineers on technical judgment, scope, and influenceRaise the engineering bar across teams: design review quality, test strategy, CI/CD, operational readiness, and code healthBuild alignment across engineering, product, and design leadership without relying on positional authorityRepresent HCM technical direction in cross-org architecture reviews and to senior leadershipContribute to hiring, leveling calibration, and technical assessment of senior and staff candidates Operational and delivery accountability Drive systemic improvement in reliability, latency, security posture, and operational toil across the charter, not just within one teamServe as a senior technical escalation point for complex, customer-impacting or cross-team incidents, and drive real root cause resolutionEnsure systems meet Intuit standards for security, privacy, data governance, and multi-jurisdiction regulatory complianceRemain hands-on where it creates the most leverage: prototypes, reference implementations, foundational components, and the hardest parts of critical paths Qualifications Minimum qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience8 or more years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scaleDemonstrated experience operating at Staff level or equivalent: setting technical direction that spanned multiple teams and was adopted beyond your immediate scopeDeep expertise in distributed systems design, service architecture, API design, and data modeling across relational and non-relational storesStrong full stack range: production depth in a modern backend language such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby or Node.js, with credible working knowledge of a modern front end framework, ideally ReactExtensive experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS or GCP, containerization, orchestration, and CI/CD at scaleSubstantive production experience building AI systems, such as LLM-backed features, retrieval-augmented architectures, or agentic workflows, including responsibility for their quality, evaluation, and operational behaviorDemonstrated fluency working AI-first in your own engineering practice, with evidence of having shifted how a team or org works, not just yourselfTrack record of leading large technical initiatives to completion through influence rather than authorityExcellent technical writing, with a portfolio of design documents or strategy documents that drove real organizational decisionsProven ability to mentor and grow senior engineers Preferred Qualifications Domain experience in HR technology, payroll, workforce management, fintech, or another domain where correctness is auditable and financially materialExperience architecting rules engines, calculation or ledger-style systems, or complex configurable workflow platformsExperience leading a significant modernization or re-platforming of a live, revenue-bearing legacy systemExperience building shared AI platform capabilities or evaluation infrastructure used by multiple product teamsExperience defining technical standards or governance adopted across an engineering organizationExperience with front end architecture at scale, including design systems, performance, and accessibilityFamiliarity with data privacy, security, and employment compliance frameworks relevant to employee data, such as SOC 2, GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA, and jurisdictional employment reporting requirementsExperience influencing across a large matrixed organization and multiple time zonesPrior experience in a Staff or Principal role at a mid-to-large-size technology company What we look for Leverage over output. You measure yourself by what the organization ships, not by what you shipJudgment at consequence. You are trusted with the decisions that are expensive to reverse, and you know which ones those areInfluence without authority. You bring people to a decision through clarity and credibility rather than escalationFrontier curiosity with engineering rigor. You adopt new capability early and still insist on evidence before it reaches customersClarity at scale. Your writing changes what an organization does 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 Toronto $164,500 - $222,500