Principal Engineer - Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
Intuit · New York, New York, United States ·
- Seniority
- Principal
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Experience
- 10+ years
Intuit · New York, New York, United States ·
Intuit Enterprise Suite is how the world's fastest-growing mid-market and enterprise finance teams run their books, close their quarter, and put AI agents to work on real accounting operations — not demos. Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are the team that makes that real: embedded with our customers, shipping production automation, and turning 'AI pilot' into 'AI in the general ledger.'
FDEs win the last mile, one customer at a time. This role exists because the last mile only compounds into a platform if someone is holding the line across all of it at once. As Principal Engineer for Forward Deploy, you are the technical throughline between three groups that each see a different slice of the problem: the Enterprise Accountant Suite organization, which owns the core agent platform FDEs build on; Product Engineering, which needs structured, credible signal instead of anecdotes; and the FDE team itself, which needs someone who can walk into the hardest customer-specific architecture problem and actually solve it.
You are an individual contributor. You do not manage the FDE engineers — that's the Forward Deploy engineering management line. You lead through the quality of what you build, the standards you set, and the trust you earn from engineers more senior than you've managed and executives more senior than you report to. You'll be judged on whether FDE's output, across every pod and every engagement, started looking like one coherent technical practice instead of forty unrelated unit-of-one builds.
Responsibilities
Define the reusable architecture patterns, integration standards, and agent-platform guardrails that every FDE pod builds on — so a solution shipped for one customer is a pattern reused for the next, not a one-off nobody can maintain.
Own the technical review bar for what ships into a customer's production environment: what counts as production-ready, what requires a security or compliance sign-off, and what gets rejected back to the drawing board.
Partner with Enterprise Accountant Suite engineering leadership to keep FDE's customer-specific work and the core platform's roadmap pointed in the same direction — FDE builds the last mile, Enterprise Accountant Suite owns the platform underneath it, and your job is making sure neither side is surprised by what the other is building.
When a pod or a Staff FDE hits something genuinely hard — an architecture decision with no clean answer, a platform limitation standing between a customer and a signed deal, a production incident nobody else can diagnose — you're who gets pulled in.
Get hands-on when it matters: review and write code, review integration architecture, and work a live customer escalation directly when the stakes or the technical depth require it.
Travel to customer sites as needed (up to 30-40%) for the engagements where your technical depth is what unblocks the deal or the deployment — not as a standing presence on every pod, but as the person who shows up when it's genuinely load-bearing.
FDE's credibility with CFOs and Controllers rests on a defensible, consistent ROI case — not a different pitch from every pod. You own the framework: how we quantify the value of an automation, how we validate it against a customer's actual numbers, and how we hold every engagement to the same bar of proof.
Coach Staff FDEs and pod leads on building and defending that case in the room with economic buyers, so the discipline scales with the team rather than living only in your own deals.
Voice-of-Customer from the field is only useful if it's structured enough for Product Engineering to act on. You own turning the patterns that show up across multiple customers — the integration nobody has, the agent behavior every pod has to work around — into a credible, prioritized input to the core roadmap.
Be the senior technical counterpart Product Engineering trusts to separate 'every customer needs this' from 'one customer asked for this' — so FDE's signal sharpens the roadmap instead of generating noise it has to filter.
This is an input to Product Engineering's roadmap, never a substitute for it. You don't re-architect the core platform, and you don't let FDE become a shadow path around Product Engineering's own prioritization.
Turn what you learn solving the hardest problems into implementation guides, architecture references, and reusable assets — the difference between FDE staying a collection of heroics and becoming a repeatable practice as it scales from a handful of engagements to the full target cohort.
Partner with FDE leadership on what has to become a shared platform capability versus what stays legitimately bespoke per customer, and keep that line honest as the team grows.
You report into Engineering, as all FDEs do, but your job is explicitly the connective tissue between three groups that don't otherwise have a shared technical owner.
Your partnership with Enterprise Accountant Suite. You build on top of what Enterprise Accountant Suite ships, and you are the technical voice that keeps FDE's field work and their platform roadmap coherent with each other. You flag platform gaps early enough that they can be prioritized, not discovered mid-deal. You don't own their roadmap, and you don't bypass it — you make sure FDE's hardest asks reach it with the context to be actionable.
Your partnership with Product Engineering. You are the structured channel for what FDE learns in the field, synthesized across engagements rather than relayed deal by deal. Product Engineering should be able to trust what reaches them through you as validated, cross-customer signal — not anecdote.
Your partnership with FDE. You are not these engineers' manager, but you are the person they escalate to when the problem is genuinely hard, and the person whose architecture decisions and review standards shape how every pod builds. Staff and Senior FDEs should see you as the technical ceiling they're growing toward, not a separate track they rarely interact with.
Qualifications
10+ years in a hands-on, customer-embedded engineering role — Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, technical consulting, or equivalent — with demonstrated progression into a technical leadership or principal-level scope, not just increasing deal size.
Deep, hands-on experience with agentic AI systems: LangChain, LangGraph, MCP servers, multi-agent orchestration, RAG, vector stores, hybrid retrieval — enough to set the architecture standard other engineers build against, not just use the tools yourself.
Experience with LLMs and tooling: OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic; GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist; prompt engineering at a level where you can review and improve someone else's agent design, not only build your own.
Deep experience with REST APIs, GraphQL, webhooks, SQL, and enterprise integrations, including the judgment to say no to an integration pattern that won't hold up across multiple customers.
A track record of being the technical escalation point across multiple simultaneous engagements — not just delivering your own, but unblocking others' — under real delivery and revenue pressure.
Demonstrated ability to build and defend a quantified ROI case directly to CFOs, Controllers, or equivalent economic buyers, and to coach others to do the same.
Experience translating field-level technical signal into a structured input a product organization actually prioritizes — not just raising issues, but making the case for why they matter at scale.
Strong technical fluency and the standing to operate as a peer with Principal and Staff engineers in Product Engineering, not as a field representative asking for favors.
You default to automation — you use AI and modern tooling to move faster, document better, and scale your own impact and the team's.
Background in high-growth SaaS, applied AI, or fintech/ERP/accounting-adjacent domains.
Domain experience in one of our priority verticals — construction (job costing, WIP, retainage), nonprofit (fund accounting, grant and donor compliance), manufacturing (inventory, cost accounting, production workflows), wealth management (client billing, compliance/regulatory reporting, investment accounting), health care (revenue cycle, compliance-heavy financial operations), franchise (zee governance, zor performance), or field services (job/work-order costing, scheduling-linked billing).
Prior experience setting technical standards or an architecture review bar for a distributed team of embedded or field engineers, rather than only for your own deployments.
Non-traditional paths are a plus: veterans, former management consultants, competitive programmers, and PhDs have historically made excellent FDEs — and excellent technical leaders within the function.
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: