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About This Role
Overview
Intuit’s Virtual Expert Platform (VEP) connects millions of customers with the right expert, guidance, and action at the right moment across TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma. We are looking for a Senior AI Scientist to be the technical architect behind how we recommend, rank, and personalize those connections.
In this role you will move beyond simple click-prediction to build a holistic understanding of the customer journey—predicting not just what a customer needs, but when they need it across multiple product verticals. You will own recommendation and ranking models end-to-end: from data discovery and feature engineering through production deployment, A/B experimentation, and ongoing optimization. Your work will directly shape which experts customers see, which products surface at the right time, and how we balance immediate business value with long-term customer trust and lifetime value.
This is a highly cross-functional role. You will partner closely with product managers, software engineers, designers, and analytics teams to define metrics, translate model performance into business outcomes, and ship solutions that work at scale. We value scientists who act like owners: identifying problems, proposing solutions, and seeing them through to launch.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and deploy large-scale recommendation and ranking models that predict what a customer needs and when they need it across multiple product verticals.
- Architect multi-stage recommendation systems—including candidate retrieval, scoring, re-ranking, and blending—that serve personalized results in real time.
- Build recommendation logic that balances immediate revenue with long-term customer trust and lifetime value, managing trade-offs across competing product categories.
- Perform hands-on data analysis and modeling with massive datasets. Discover data sources, build ETL pipelines, clean and import data, and make it model-ready.
- Engineer and iterate on features from underlying data, combining domain understanding with statistical rigor to continuously improve model performance.
- Design and run A/B tests, perform rigorous statistical analysis, draw causal conclusions, and communicate actionable insights to peers and leadership.
- Collaborate closely with partner teams to define metrics that quantify revenue, engagement, customer experience, and long-term member value.
- Represent AI Science in cross-functional meetings and reviews. Translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives for business stakeholders.
- Explore emerging techniques—including generative AI, reinforcement learning, and agentic architectures—and evaluate how they can improve recommendation quality or enable new customer experiences.
Qualifications
Required
- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Physics, or a related quantitative discipline.
- 4+ years of industry experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment (consumer tech, fintech, or e-commerce preferred).
- Expert proficiency in Python and SQL, with deep experience in modern ML/DL frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy).
- Strong experience with ranking, retrieval, and multi-stage recommendation architectures.
- Solid foundation in statistical modeling, and ML techniques: classification, regression, clustering, neural networks, decision trees, anomaly detection, and recommender systems.
- Proficiency working with large-scale data ecosystems (Hive, Spark, SparkSQL, or equivalent).
- Comfortable working in a Linux environment.
- Demonstrated ability to explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences, and to link model performance to business outcomes.
Preferred
- Deep learning expertise applied to recommendation, personalization, or representation learning (embeddings, two-tower models, sequence models, transformers).
- Experience with NLP/NLU techniques—such as text representation, semantic similarity, and transformer models—in the context of improving recommendations or customer matching.
- Familiarity with agentic AI patterns: tool calling, multi-step reasoning, or orchestrating LLM-based workflows to augment recommendation or decision-support systems.
- Exposure to reinforcement learning or dynamic optimization for real-time decision-making systems.
- Expertise in computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and performance considerations.
- Experience in a marketplace, ads, or matching environment where you manage trade-offs between competing objectives.
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:
The expected base pay range for this position is:
Mountain View $180,000 - $243,500
Salary Context
This $180K-$243K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $176K across 1540 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Intuit, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $212,000 based on 11,857 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. Disclosed range: $180K to $243K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,275; VP: $235,000.
Intuit AI Hiring
Intuit has 32 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Data Scientist, AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, MLOps Engineer. Positions span Mountain View, CA, US, San Diego, CA, US, New York, NY. Compensation range: $116K - $369K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (568 positions) offer remote work, while 9,010 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,413 roles, $264,500 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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