Инженеры Intuit переходят от решения рутинных задач к выбору стратегических проблем для разработки

As AI rapidly changes the way software is built, engineers are increasingly spending less time solving routine problems and more time deciding which problems are worth solving in the first place. For platform engineering teams, that shift also brings a greater focus on resiliency, developer experience and building infrastructure that is ready for an AI-led future. Harsh Mittal, who works across platform resiliency and developer experience at Intuit, has seen this shift firsthand. He discusses the engineering challenges that attracted him to Intuit, how AI is changing the way engineers work, why customer needs must remain at the centre of technology decisions, and the lessons he believes young engineers should take into their careers. Intuit has a mature developer ecosystem with a rich set of internal capabilities, often called paved roads: foundational building blocks that developers rely on to build powerful, composite applications and experiences. Each capability had done its best to offer a holistic, self-serve experience, but the ways teams configured and deployed changes to their infrastructure weren't always consistent. There were multiple ways to describe the configuration of a capability, and multiple ways to deploy changes to infrastructure. This challenged the muscle memory of our builders and meant compounded investment in keeping these distinct workflows "best-in-class."What drew me to this problem was that it wasn't purely technical. It required driving a change across a wide array of capability teams to agree on core tenets of what it means to build an enterprise-ready capability, and then incrementally delivering value to our customers. This soon evolved into our drive for making our capabilities AI-ready. What's fascinating is that it's not your everyday challenge of building a large-scale distributed system. Rather, it's about orchestrating a foundational change across an entire enterprise. 2. Your role spans platform resiliency and developer experience. What's the most rewarding part of building technology that succeeds by making everyone else more successful? I always joke that my first customer is myself. As an engineer, I get to experience the same friction my customers do, solve those problems firsthand, dogfood the solutions, and then share that experience with fellow builders. That's an incredibly rewarding feedback loop. But more broadly, wins from platform organizations aren't typically as visible as those from a customer-facing product feature. A customer-facing feature gets celebrated the day it launches, but platform investments compound quietly over time. Six or twelve months later, people can barely remember what life was like before that capability existed. And that's what I aspire to build - a world where outputs become daily verbs for our customers. 3. AI is changing how software gets built. How has it changed the kinds of problems you personally spend your time solving, and what do you think still requires distinctly human engineering judgment? For me, solid engineering has always been about marrying customer and business outcomes with technology, not the other way around. That hasn't changed, and neither has the core problem space. What AI has done is: a) let you knock out the smaller, well-understood problems much more swiftly, under continuous developer oversight, and b) let you brainstorm, form hypotheses, collect data, and curate problem statements much more quickly with agents and tools at your disposal. This significantly improves the throughput of ideas ready to be tackled next. But it also means human judgment is even more critical as you go after the big problems. Not only because they're hard engineering problems, but because their scope and impact are much larger. You need to balance customer needs, product lifecycle, business growth, and software complexity all at once. Today, AI is also helping us write specs, review code, and improve developer workflows. But deciding what is worth building in the first place and why remains a fundamentally human responsibility. 4. Intuit often talks about customer obsession. Can you share a moment when understanding a customer problem changed the direction of an engineering decision? This goes back to my first month at Intuit. We were working on supporting progressive deployments for a platform offering - a top customer ask and something indispensable for our overall resiliency posture. During my conversations with the team, I realized that a few implementation decisions, while helping us ship faster, could create edge-case reliability issues under certain conditions - the kind that would erode customers' trust in the feature rather than build it. We had to step back and look at this not from the platform's perspective, but from the lens of the operator who'd be using it and making go/no-go decisions based on it. I urged the team to reconsider, and we were able to close those gaps and ship a much more polished product. The feature recently went GA and has been a real success, both in preventing incidents and making our deployments far more reliable. 5. Looking back on your own growth as an engineer, what's one lesson you've learned that you now pass on to younger engineers? Curiosity and hard work. I mention this almost every time I meet engineers just entering the industry. Work as hard as you can during your early years and absorb as much as possible. Working hard doesn't mean simply putting in longer hours, but by deliberately seeking opportunities to experience every part of the product development lifecycle from the front lines. I used to volunteer for on-call rotations because when things break in production, you learn stuff that no design tutorial will ever teach you. Just as importantly, never box yourself into the component, service, or team you've been assigned. Stay curious about the adjacent systems, understand how the pieces fit together, and keep expanding your perspective. It is these experiences and learnings that prepare you for the next big opportunity in your career. What excites me most is that as routine problems become increasingly automated, we'll have more exposure, time, and bandwidth to look at the vast expanse of problems that simply never make it to our roadmaps today. The frontiers of healthcare, human welfare, space exploration, financial services - the very boundaries of the world we live in offer enormous room for impact. I also look forward to an ecosystem where engineers and builders from across a diverse set of skills and organizations come together to collaborate on these hard problems. I think we'll look back at this period as one of those rare moments where the tools fundamentally changed what humanity was capable of building together. Moneycontrol Journalists are not involved in creation of this article. Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!