Principal Forward Deployed Engineer — AI-Native Invoicing

Overview ------------

THE ROLE

Intuit already has a small group of high-profile QuickBooks Influencers — accountants, bookkeepers, and advisors — who work directly with small and medium-sized businesses and have quietly built their own workarounds, spreadsheets, and habits to get invoicing done faster than our product lets them. This role exists to go sit with them, build what they actually need with AI, and turn what works into something every QuickBooks customer can use.

You will not be assigned a spec and asked to build against it. You will be assigned a short list of Influencers, and it's on you to build the relationship, understand their workflow well enough to build for it, hand-craft an AI-native invoicing solution for each one, and then find the pattern underneath the handful of one-offs that turns into a real product bet. This is a founding-engineer loop embedded inside a Principal Software Engineer role — field time, not just lab time.

Responsibilities

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Identify and build direct, trusted relationships with a curated set of high-profile QuickBooks Influencers who serve SMBs — the people who are often ahead of our own roadmap.
• Embed in their real invoicing workflows: shadow how they and their SMB clients actually get paid, where AI could remove friction, and where the product falls short today.
• Design and hand-build custom, AI-native invoicing solutions for a handful of these Influencers — power-user agents, automations, and workflows tuned to how they actually work, not a generic demo.
• Iterate quickly and directly with the Influencer and their SMB clients based on real usage and feedback, in the field, not through a backlog.
• Look across the handful of bespoke builds for what generalizes, and partner with QuickBooks Invoicing product and engineering leadership to turn it into a roadmap-ready product capability.
• Act as the technical face of Intuit to this community — demo, explain, and evangelize AI-native invoicing at Influencer events, accounting conferences, and small-business gatherings.
• Travel regularly to meet Influencers and their SMB customers where they work, rather than expecting them to come to you.

Qualifications

WHO YOU ARE

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or customer-embedded engineering role — you've built custom software for a real, demanding user before, not just internal tooling.
• A hands-on builder with modern AI/LLM application patterns (agents, RAG, tool use) who can go from a workflow observation to a working prototype in days, not quarters.
• Comfortable operating with more ambiguity than a typical Principal Software Engineer role — you'll often be the one deciding what gets built and for whom.
• Superior communication skills: you can sit with an accountant or an SMB owner who has never heard the word “agent” and leave them able to explain, in their own words, what you built and why it helps their business.
• Genuine comfort working alongside accounting professionals and small-to-medium business owners, on their turf and their schedule, not just in a conference room.
• Willingness and enthusiasm to travel regularly — this is a field role by design, not a desk job with occasional trips.
• A track record of taking a one-off solution and generalizing it into something a product and engineering team can scale — you build the pattern, not just the instance.

NICE TO HAVE

• Prior work with a Chamber of Commerce, SBA, SCORE, a trade association, or another organization that serves small businesses — huge plus.
• Background in accounting, bookkeeping, or fintech software built for SMBs.
• Experience with QuickBooks, Intuit's developer platform, or invoicing/payments systems.

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