Principal Engineer - Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- New York, New York, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 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
- 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 en
- 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 bu
- 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.
Nice to have
- 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, pro
- 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
Full description
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
Set the technical standards every FDE engagement builds against
- 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.
Be the technical escalation point for the hardest problems in the field
- 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.