Principal Software Engineer, AI-Powered Work
Intuit
Listing collected from Intuit's career site. NextChapter is independent of Intuit.
Mountain View, CA · Posted October 22, 2026
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Where Mountain View, CA ranks
Where Mountain View, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs45% · of 100
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast45% · of 71
- #1Best cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast68% · of 71
- #1Best all-round cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast85 / 100 · of 39
- #1Best all-round cities for AI careers in the West Coast96 / 100 · of 39
- #2Best cities for finance pay after cost of living$161k · of 35
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 51 open principal software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $205,500 to $274,000 and the median is $240,000.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Principal Software Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Intuit has filed one layoff notice in the last twelve months, covering 162 workers, most recently May 2026. These are public filings with state labor departments, and an open role can sit alongside them. See the filings
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
We’re seeking a Principal Software Engineer to shape how AI transforms everyday work at Intuit. You will lead the technical strategy and engineering of shared capabilities that help employees find trusted information, make informed decisions, and complete complex workflows through collaboration with AI agents.
As a senior individual contributor, you will turn ambiguous business problems into reliable production systems. Your scope will span the shared platform and a prioritized portfolio of employee workflows, connecting enterprise knowledge, business applications, and AI capabilities. You will remain hands-on with critical implementations while guiding architecture and engineering decisions across teams
Responsibilities
Define the technical direction. Establish a multiyear architecture and roadmap for AI-powered work. Make clear decisions about what to build, integrate, or buy, and how to extend existing Intuit platforms.
Build reusable capabilities. Lead engineering for permission-aware context, agent orchestration, business-system integrations, and evaluation. Enable teams to deliver new workflows using common components.
Own difficult engineering problems through production. Write code, develop reference implementations, lead design reviews, and resolve issues involving distributed execution, data freshness, identity, and recovery from partial failures.
Design dependable human–AI collaboration. Define when agents can act, when approval is required, and how work returns to a person. Make agent actions understandable, traceable, and recoverable.
Set the production quality bar. Establish evaluation datasets, release criteria, monitoring, and incident practices. Balance task accuracy, latency, reliability, privacy, and cost throughout the system lifecycle.
Deliver measurable improvements in work. Partner with product managers and functional leaders to understand current workflows, select valuable opportunities, and measure improvements in completion time, quality, and employee effort.
Multiply engineering capability. Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, develop shared technical standards for quality, security, and maintainability, and align teams on consequential architecture decisions. Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to senior leaders.
Qualifications
15+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial ownership of large enterprise systems and complex distributed architectures.
Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams, with a record of turning long-term architectural direction into shipped software.
Hands-on experience deploying AI capabilities into production, including language-model APIs, retrieval, context engineering, tool execution, and agent orchestration.
Strong programming and system-design skills, with depth in Python, Java, TypeScript, or comparable languages.
Experience building cloud services and integrating enterprise applications, identity systems, and data platforms.
Practical experience evaluating AI behavior, diagnosing failures, and improving quality, security, performance, and operating cost.
Sound judgment about where AI adds value and where deterministic software or human decisions are more appropriate.
The ability to influence without direct authority, develop technical leaders, and make decisions amid uncertainty.
A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience with employee productivity platforms, enterprise workflow automation, developer tooling, and regulated or sensitive data environments would be valuable
Success means employees complete important workflows faster with less rework; teams can build on reusable capabilities; and deployed systems meet explicit quality, reliability, and cost targets. You own technical architecture and engineering execution, partnering with product and functional leaders on priorities, workflow policy, and adoption.
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: Mountain View $261,500 - $353,500