Staff Software Engineer, Traffic

Credit Karma is a mission-driven company, focused on championing financial progress for our more than 100 million members in the U.S., Canada and U.K. While we're best known for pioneering free credit scores, our members turn to us as they work on their financial goals - monitoring credit, identity protection, searching for credit cards, shopping for loans, and growing their savings - all for free. Credit Karma has grown significantly through the years, adding more than 70 million members in the last five years and now employing more than 1,100 people across offices in Oakland, Charlotte, Los Angeles and London.

The Traffic team at Credit Karma owns the critical infrastructure that every request flows through: our service mesh, API gateway, and database proxy. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll own the technical vision for a meaningful slice of that infrastructure, driving it from design through production, and setting the standard for how it should be built. You'll act as a subject-matter expert the team leans on, distilling ambiguous technical problems into clear solutions and making the engineers around you sharper through review, coaching, and example. If you're energized by deep technical problems and building platforms that hold up at scale, this role is worth a look.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision and strategy for a domain within our service mesh and edge tier from design through implementation, rollout, and long-term health

• Lead the technical design of complex systems, weighing tradeoffs and foreseeing long-term implications

• Establish and encourage engineering best practices within the team, driving what operational excellence looks like for the systems you own

• Solve ambiguous, cross-cutting problems and identify productivity improvements that reach beyond your own work

• Orchestrate the work by sequencing dependencies, surfacing risks early, and adapting plans as requirements shift

• Partner with adjacent teams and stakeholders when your domain's direction touches their systems

• Coach and give actionable feedback to other engineers, helping them drive projects independently and sharpen their technical judgment

Qualifications

What we are looking for

• Experience owning the technical vision for a domain or system end-to-end in a high-traffic production environment, from design through rollout, with real accountability for its long-term health

• Deep experience designing, building, and owning production systems code in a language like Go. Deep expertise in any single language matters less than fluency with the underlying patterns (controllers, reconcilers, event loops, concurrency models) and the judgment to know when code is the right tool

• Solid experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production, whether on Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, or comparable orchestration - you understand how these systems behave, fail, and recover under production load

• A track record of establishing engineering best practices and raising the bar for the team around you

• A track record of coaching other engineers, through code review, design feedback, and mentorship, to help them work more independently

• Ability to work effectively with peers and stakeholders outside your immediate team when your domain's direction touches their systems

• A history of ramping quickly into unfamiliar technical domains and shipping meaningful work within months - the specific stack matters less than your ability to learn fast and apply strong fundamentals

What we'd like to see

• Pattern literacy across multiple infrastructure domains (service meshes, edge proxies, orchestration platforms, distributed storage, networking) - you don't need our specific stack, just the ability to recognize the shapes of the problems and pick up new systems quickly

• Strong systems-level debugging instincts and production intuition - the ability to hold a whole system in your head and reason from symptoms to root cause under pressure

• Grounding in reliability engineering as a practice: SLO design, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident response

• Familiarity with service mesh data planes (Istio, Envoy, or comparable) or with Kubernetes operator patterns - either is a meaningful signal, neither is required

• Visible engagement with the broader engineering community: open source contributions, conference talks, or published writing

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: San Diego $188,500 - $255,000