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Principal Software Engineer - Trust & Safety

Category Software Engineering Location Mountain View, California; San Diego, California Job ID 18586
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Company Overview

Intuit is the global financial technology platform that powers prosperity for the people and communities we serve. With approximately 100 million customers worldwide using products such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, we believe that everyone should have the opportunity to prosper. We never stop working to find new, innovative ways to make that possible.

Job Overview

Intuit is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technology vision and execution for our Trust & Safety organization. This role focuses on protecting customers, partners and products across multiple risk vectors including access and identity integrity, misuse of products and experiences, and regulatory and compliance needs.


You will drive the design and implementation of AI and data-driven trust and safety capabilities, signals, and decisioning systems that detect, prevent, and respond to risk at scale, while minimizing friction for trustworthy customers. You’ll partner with Product, Data Science, Security, Compliance, Risk and Operations to create end-to-end solutions that keep customers safe and enable Intuit to innovate with confidence.


Responsibilities


  • Contribute to the overall Trust & Safety architecture across multiple risk vectors and product offerings, with a focus on scalable and secure capabilities.

  • Collaborate with other architects and senior engineers to design end-to-end technical solutions that protect access and identity, manage risk in critical flows, prevent misuse of products and support regulatory and compliance-oriented controls.

  • Design and implement core services and decisioning components using Java (e.g., Spring/Spring Boot, microservices, event-driven architectures) in cloud-native environments.

  • Partner with data science and ML teams to integrate models into production decision flows for risk scoring, classification, anomaly detection, and prioritization.

  • Apply modern AI techniques, including LLM-based tools where appropriate, to automate triage and classification of risk-related events and content, working closely with ML and product partners.

  • Help define evaluation strategies, metrics, and experimentation approaches to continuously improve protection effectiveness while minimizing friction for trustworthy customers.

  • Contribute to the design of high-throughput, low-latency services and pipelines.

  • Drive best practices for reliability, performance, observability, and operational excellence for safety-critical systems, including input into SLOs, alerting, runbooks, and on-call readiness.

  • Ensure designs and implementations align with security, privacy, and regulatory expectations, advocating for secure-by-design and privacy-by-design principles.

  • Identify and propose opportunities to standardize risk signals, services, and decisioning patterns across teams and product areas.

  • Partner with product, engineering, and platform teams to influence roadmaps and ensure safety and risk controls are built into customer journeys from the start.

  • Lead and participate in design reviews, architecture discussions, and technical decision-making for cross-team initiatives.

  • Mentor and coach engineers on software engineering, system design, safety thinking, and operational rigor, helping to raise the technical bar across teams.

  • Contribute to the definition, documentation, and adoption of standards, patterns, and best practices for Trust & Safety platforms and services.

  • Participate in prototypes and proof-of-concepts for new safety capabilities and technologies, and support their evolution into robust, production-ready solutions.

  • Provide thought leadership on industry trends in risk, abuse, identity, and AI safety, and share insights with the broader architecture and engineering community.

  • Promote a culture of security-by-design and risk-awareness across engineering teams through influence, example, and collaboration.


Qualifications


  • 10+ years of experience designing and building large-scale, distributed backend systems in production.

  • Extensive hands-on experience with Java (JVM, Spring/Spring Boot, microservices, asynchronous and event-driven architectures).

  • Experience working in domains related to risk, security, safety, identity, access, financial/transactional flows, content/interaction integrity, or compliance-oriented systems.

  • Strong understanding of service and API design, performance optimization, concurrency, resiliency, and fault-tolerant architectures.

  • Experience building and operating cloud-native services on AWS, GCP, or equivalent (containers, Kubernetes, managed data stores, messaging/streaming platforms such as Kafka/Kinesis).

  • Experience integrating ML models into production systems (e.g. serving, re-training, post-production evaluation).

  • Familiarity with modern AI/LLM tooling and patterns and how they can be applied to automation, classification, or workflow acceleration in safety/risk contexts.

  • Strong skills in observability and operations: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs, and running always-on, high-availability services.

  • Solid grounding in secure coding practices, authentication/authorization patterns, data protection, and privacy-aware system design.

  • Proven track record collaborating with Product, Data Science/ML and Business teams on complex initiatives.

  • Experience influencing architecture and design across multiple teams, including participating in and leading design reviews and technical decision-making.

  • Demonstrated ability to mentor and coach other engineers in areas such as software engineering, system design, and operational excellence.

  • Strong communication skills, ability to explain complex technical and security concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior leaders.

  • Comfortable working in a matrixed, globally distributed environment and driving progress in ambiguous problem spaces.

  • Self-directed, proactive, and outcome-oriented, with a bias toward collaboration and long-term, sustainable solutions.

  • BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.


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. The expected base pay range for this position is: 

Bay Area California $ 254,500 - 344,000

Southern California $ 242,000- 327,500


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Career Path

Mobility plays an important role for our engineering community. In addition to vertical growth, our teams offer lateral growth opportunities. Whether it’s working on a different tech stack or product, Intuit will help you get to the next step in your career.

  • Software Engineer 1 & 2
  • Sr. Software Engineer
  • Staff Software Engineer
  • Sr. Staff Software Engineer
  • Principal Software Engineer
  • Distinguished Software Engineer

Intuit supports you, not just as you are now, but as the person that you want to grow to be.

Alex Pollock Senior Software Engineer

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