What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Staff Software Site Reliability Engineer - Credit Karma position at Intuit?
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 Site Reliability Engineer, you'll serve as a technical anchor for the team. You'll keep a production-hardened service mesh reliable and evolvable at scale, advance how we protect the platform under load, and set the standard for SRE practice across engineering. We're looking for someone who operates at the program level. That means driving technical strategy across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and shaping how a large-scale platform stays reliable as it grows. If you're energized by deep technical problems, real organizational scope, and building platforms that make every engineer around you more effective, this role is worth a look.
What you'll do
Drive the technical strategy and roadmap for how our service mesh evolves across multiple engineering teams, including reliability, upgrade posture, and cross-cluster capabilities
Define how we protect the platform under load, building the primitives and patterns that make our services resilient by design
Shape the long-term direction of our edge tier, balancing operational sustainability with developer experience
Raise the bar on Site Reliability Engineering practice across the organization. Reduce operational toil, improve incident response, and build a culture of reliability
Partner with engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to align platform direction with business needs
Make the engineers around you better through mentorship, technical coaching, and architectural decisions that extend beyond your immediate team
What's great about the role
Shape the technical vision that bridges infrastructure and application development, with real influence across the company
See your work directly improve both the experience for our members and the productivity of your fellow Karmanauts
Work on infrastructure that runs at the scale of 100M members. The systems are mature and production-hardened, the problems are sharp-edged, and the decisions carry real weight
Work in a culture that takes learning and growth seriously, with the scope and support to keep developing as an engineer
Benefit from a supportive environment where mentorship and community are valued
Take advantage of comprehensive company perks that enhance your life both inside and outside of work
Responsibilities
What we are looking for
Extensive experience owning and driving multi-team technical programs in a high-traffic production environment. Not just delivering individual projects, but shaping strategy, roadmap, and architectural direction across several teams
Comfort owning non-trivial production code. You can read, reason about, and ship meaningful changes to systems-level 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
Deep experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production, whether on Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, or comparable orchestration. What matters is that you understand how these systems behave, fail, and recover under production load, not which specific platform you've used
A track record of making the engineers around you better through mentorship, technical review, and design coaching
Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without direct authority, build alignment across engineering teams, and evolve how an organization approaches a technical domain
A history of ramping quickly into unfamiliar technical domains and shipping meaningful work within months. The specific stack we use matters less than your ability to learn new systems fast and apply strong fundamentals to whatever you find
Qualifications
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 to have used our specific stack; you need to recognize the shapes of the problems and pick up new systems quickly
Strong grounding in reliability engineering as a practice: SLO design, error budgets, capacity planning, incident response, and the discipline to build feedback loops into production systems
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
Familiarity with service mesh data planes (Istio, Envoy, or comparable) or with Kubernetes operator patterns. Either one 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: