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.

• 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).

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…