Staff Database Engineer

Company Overview

Job Overview

The Staff Database Engineer is a senior individual contributor who serves as the technical authority for database platform engineering across one or more product domains. In this role, you will drive the reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence of Intuit's production database systems — spanning cloud-native databases such as Google Cloud Spanner, Aurora PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. You will partner closely with product engineering teams, SREs, and platform architects to set database standards, inform architecture decisions, and lead complex cross-team initiatives from inception through delivery. The Staff DBE is expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, influence technical strategy beyond their immediate team, and raise the overall database engineering craft across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end database reliability, performance, and scalability for production systems supporting millions of Intuit customers; proactively identify and mitigate risks before they become incidents.
• Define and evolve database engineering standards, best practices, and patterns for the broader engineering organization — covering schema design, query optimization, connection management, replication, backup/recovery, and capacity planning.
• Lead the design and implementation of complex database migrations (e.g., monolith decompositions, cloud migrations, engine upgrades) with minimal customer impact.
• Partner with service teams to conduct database design reviews, performance assessments, and incident retrospectives; translate findings into durable improvements.
• Drive automation of database operational workflows (provisioning, failover, patching, health checks) to reduce toil and increase reliability.
• Serve as a primary escalation point for critical P0/P1 database incidents; lead root cause analysis and drive systemic remediation.
• Evaluate and introduce new database technologies, tools, and architectural approaches aligned with Intuit's cloud-first, AI-driven engineering strategy.
• Mentor and grow the database engineering community, including senior and mid-level engineers; contribute to hiring and leveling decisions.
• Influence roadmaps and investment decisions across partner engineering and platform teams by building data-driven cases grounded in reliability and performance metrics.
• Represent the DBE function in cross-functional programs, including production readiness reviews, OpEx initiatives, and architecture forums.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience, with 5+ years in a dedicated database engineering or DBA role at scale.
• Deep hands-on expertise with one or more of: Aurora PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google Cloud Spanner, or comparable distributed/relational database systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating high-availability, high-throughput database systems in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong command of query optimization, indexing strategies, execution plans, and performance tuning at production scale.
• Experience leading large-scale database migrations, version upgrades, or cloud transitions with zero or near-zero downtime.
• Proficiency in automation and scripting (Python, Bash, or similar) for database operations and tooling.
• Track record of driving cross-team technical initiatives end-to-end, including influencing teams and stakeholders without direct authority.
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate complex database topics for non-specialist audiences including product and business stakeholders.

• Experience with distributed database systems (Spanner, CockroachDB, Vitess) and NewSQL architectures.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) applied to database provisioning and configuration management.
• Background in SRE or platform engineering with a strong operational mindset (SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction).
• Experience in a highly regulated or compliance-sensitive environment (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, GDPR).
• Prior experience mentoring staff-level ICs or contributing to engineering-wide technical strategy.

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: $168,000 to $259,000 depending on location.