Principal Software Engineer

Intuit is a global technology platform that helps our customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. Serving over 50 million customers worldwide, we are redefining how individuals and businesses manage money.

Intuit Fintech, one of the company’s fastest growing and most strategic business units, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the long term technology vision and architecture of the Fintech Risk Platform.

This role sits at the center of trillion-dollar money movement, where you will design and drive systems that protect customers, minimize fraud, reduce churn, and optimize risk loss rates-all while enabling seamless financial experiences. You will operate at the intersection of risk intelligence, large-scale distributed systems, AI/GenAI, and financial infrastructure, shaping platforms that must be highly reliable, explainable, and globally scalable.

This is a company wide technical leadership role requiring deep expertise, strategic thinking, and the ability to influence across engineering, product, data science, compliance, and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Technology Vision & Strategy

• Define and drive the multi-year technical vision and architecture for the Fintech Risk Platform, aligning with Intuit’s broader financial ecosystem strategy.

• Architect systems capable of supporting $1T+ annual money movement with industry-leading availability, latency, and security guarantees.

• Establish a forward-looking roadmap for risk intelligence, leveraging AI/ML and GenAI to evolve from reactive fraud detection to proactive risk prevention and autonomous decisioning.

• Balance risk mitigation, customer experience, and growth, ensuring optimal trade-offs between fraud prevention, false positives, and customer friction.

System Architecture & Cross-Functional Design

• Lead the design of end-to-end risk decisioning systems, spanning transaction processing, identity verification, fraud detection, compliance, and dispute handling.

• Drive cross-functional architecture across payments, ledgers, identity, analytics, and customer platforms to ensure cohesive and scalable solutions.

• Establish real-time and batch risk pipelines that unify signals across the ecosystem to deliver consistent, low-latency decisions.

• Ensure systems are auditable, explainable, and compliant with evolving financial regulations.

Building High-Impact, Planet-Scale Systems

• Design and oversee platforms that operate at extreme scale, handling billions of transactions with sub-second risk decisions.

• Lead the development of resilient, fault-tolerant distributed systems with strong consistency guarantees for financial correctness.

• Drive innovations in risk scoring, anomaly detection, and behavioral modeling to significantly reduce fraud and abuse.

• Optimize systems to reduce fraud loss rate, minimize customer friction, and increase approval rates for good transactions.

AI/ML & Data-Driven Risk Intelligence

• Champion the integration of advanced ML models and GenAI into risk workflows, including:

  • Fraud detection and classification

  • Identity risk assessment

  • Adaptive policy generation

  • Explainable AI for compliance and auditability

• Define best practices for model lifecycle management, experimentation, and real-time inference at scale.

• Partner with data science teams to translate models into production-grade, scalable systems.

Business Impact & Metrics Ownership

• Own and influence key business metrics, including:

  • Fraud loss rate reduction

  • False positive rate / customer friction

  • Customer churn due to risk decisions

  • Approval rates and revenue protection

• Establish measurement frameworks, experimentation strategies (A/B testing), and executive dashboards to guide decision-making.

• Continuously refine systems to maximize trust while enabling growth.

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Act as a technical authority across multiple organizations, influencing architecture, design standards, and engineering practices.

• Lead and mentor senior and staff engineers, raising the overall technical bar across the organization.

• Drive engineering excellence in scalability, reliability, observability, and security.

• Partner with executives and cross-functional leaders to align technology investments with business priorities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.

• 12+ years of experience building and scaling complex distributed systems, with a strong track record of technical leadership.

• Proven experience architecting large-scale financial systems, payment platforms, or risk/fraud systems.

• Deep expertise in:

  • Backend systems (Java, Spring Boot, or equivalent)

  • Frontend technologies (React or modern frameworks)

  • Cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and distributed architectures

• Strong experience with AI/ML systems in production, including real-time decisioning and model integration.

• Demonstrated ability to design systems operating at extreme scale (billions of transactions, low-latency decisioning).

• Expertise in risk analytics, fraud detection strategies, and compliance requirements in Fintech.

• Proficiency in data technologies (Python, SQL, data pipelines, streaming frameworks).

• Exceptional ability to drive alignment across engineering, product, data science, and business stakeholders.

• Strong business acumen with the ability to connect technical decisions to financial outcomes and customer impact.

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.

Mountain View $261,500 - $353,500