Principal Software Engineer – SRE, Incident Response & Operational Excellence

Intuit is the global financial technology platform that powers prosperity for the people and communities we serve. Our public-facing products — TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp — serve approximately 100 million customers who depend on us at the moments that matter most: filing a return before the deadline, running payroll, checking their credit, or sending a campaign. When something breaks, minutes matter, and how quickly and how well we recover is a direct expression of our customer promise. We are hiring Principal Software Engineers to serve as Technical Duty Officers (TDOs) — the leaders who take command of Intuit’s most critical incidents. During our most critical incidents you hold ultimate authority on decisions and enforcement of our incident principles, partnering with the Business Unit Driver and the Incident Operations Center (IOC) to direct recovery, actions, and communications on the bridge. Reporting to the Director of Cloud Engineering & Operations, this is a dedicated, full-time role: when you are not on the bridge, your mandate is to make the next incident shorter, rarer, and better understood — partnering across every business unit on effective observability, clarity of customer workflows and their real-time impact signals, high-quality runbooks, and validated escalation and notification readiness. This role is equal parts operator, engineer, and leader. You bring the calm, decisive command presence to lead senior leaders through high-stakes ambiguity, the deep systems intuition to cut to the most likely fault and the fastest safe path to recovery, and the engineering skills to implement the improvements you identify rather than hand them off. As a Principal engineer, you will not just execute this work manually but direct, orchestrate, and govern AI agents to accelerate detection, triage, impact assessment, and post-incident learning, accountable for the quality and reliability of everything you and those agents produce. Responsibilities Lead Intuit’s most critical incidents, serve as the “Technical Duty Officer” role on all significant incidents, holding ultimate authority on decisions and enforcement of incident principles; direct recovery, actions, and communications on the bridge in partnership with the BU Driver and IOC Leader Drive fast recovery, bias the bridge toward mitigation over diagnosis, make timely and decisive calls on rollbacks, failovers, traffic shifts, and feature disablement, and keep responders focused on the shortest safe path to restoring the customer experience Get the priority right early, challenge and correct incident priority based on customer impact during active response rather than after recovery, and ensure the right leaders, escalations, and communications are engaged at the right time Establish clear customer-impact signals, partner with each business unit to define, instrument, and continuously report real-time customer impact for the highest-value workflows across top revenue-generating products, and drive readiness validation through the company-wide Customer Impact Gameday Raise the observability bar, partner with platform and product teams on SLOs, dashboards, alerting, and tracing so responders can assess the problem and its impact in minutes; feed tool and product-gap findings from live incidents back to platform teams as part of the RCA Own runbook and workflow clarity, ensure critical customer workflows have accurate, exercised runbooks and clear service ownership, and drive the recurring validation of notification channels, escalation policies, bridge creation, and executive notification workflows Make communications actionable, work with the IOC Leader so that executive and customer-facing updates consistently convey customer impact, recovery progress, and next steps with enough clarity for confident decision-making Lead post-incident learning, drive blameless RCAs for the incidents you command, identify systemic and cross-BU remediation, and trac