Intuit is focused on letting the builders build

Toronto is home to a growing number of global companies, drawn to the city by Canada’s high calibre of engineering talent. 

Among those companies is Intuit, whose products include TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp.

“Working at Intuit offers the ability to impact approximately 100 million customers. It’s been 23 years and I still get excited about that.”

Greg Coulombe, Intuit

A global company with 18,800 employees and approximately 100 million customers worldwide, Intuit was founded in 1983 and has been in Canada since 1993. Intuit moved into its new Canadian headquarters in Toronto in 2022.

As Intuit’s Director of Product Development, Tax Foundations, Greg Coulombe oversees a team of local engineers focused on the company’s Canadian tax products, AI adoption, and data innovation.

BetaKit sat down with Coulombe to talk about cultivating innovation, the impact of AI, and the advice he gave his daughter as she completes a computer science degree and potentially pursues a career in tech.

A different mindset

When it comes to hiring tech roles, Intuit isn’t just looking for coders. According to Coulombe, it’s looking for creators.

While technical skills are tablestakes, he said what sets Intuit’s team apart is their ability to assume an entrepreneurial mindset, which means critically assessing the value and purpose behind their work.

“I would like our technologists to stop and say: ‘I’m not sure that makes any sense. Why would our customers want this? Why are we doing that?’” Coulombe said.

Innovation requires intentional culture, especially in large organizations where established processes can stifle creativity. Coulombe knows this tension well. At Intuit, making mistakes aren’t just tolerated, they’re encouraged, he said.

“We’re trying to create a culture where it’s OK to break boundaries and make mistakes,” he said, adding that teams are often encouraged to work cross functionally to break down silos, cut through red tape, and keep things moving.

According to Coulombe, a key element of Intuit’s innovation culture is its Global Engineering Days, a bi-annual, five-day, internal “code-a-thon” where employees from all locations collaborate on self-chosen projects.

“It’s my favourite two weeks of the year,” Coulombe said. “On the last day of the event, I get to walk around and see all the amazing innovations. It really creates passion and excitement about what our technologists are going to bring to the table.” 

Close to 7,500 participants across 13 Intuit locations in the United States, Canada, Israel, and India participated in the most recent GED. Coulombe noted that over the years, hundreds of GED projects across multiple disciplines have made their way into Intuit products as new features or into the company’s development environment as productivity-enhancing tools. 

The chance to impact millions

AI is messy. It’s powerful, exciting, and frustrating all at once—a tool with incredible potential that refuses to fit neatly into a box. For Coulombe, the challenge lies in navigating that chaos.

“What I find challenging and struggle with as a leader and as a technologist is the fundamental uncertainty that AI brings into the system,” he said. “How do we take this cool stuff and make it actually work properly? That’s a very interesting challenge.”

Coulombe believes the main draw of working at Intuit lies in the opportunity to impact global users of its tax software.

“Working at Intuit offers the ability to impact approximately 100 million customers,” he said. “It’s been 23 years and I still get excited about that. It comes with a lot of responsibility, which is scary sometimes, but the potential to impact so many people’s lives is really cool. Where can you impact 100 million people with the work that you do? That’s rare.”

Letting the builders build

Many companies hire senior engineers for their management skills. At Intuit, the approach is different, according to Coulombe. Senior engineers are encouraged to spend less time managing and more time building.

“It’s not that we don’t want them to be leaders, but once they progress as an engineer, they could be doing more people facilitation and start to step away from the technology,” he said. “We’re strategically trying to pivot back to having our most valuable technical contributors doing more of the technical work and leading by example. We have managers. Let the builders build.”

Tech’s next generation is levelling up

The expectations for new graduates entering the tech industry have skyrocketed. Coulombe explained that a computer science degree is no longer enough to stand out. Companies now expect candidates to bring tangible experience to the table—whether through internships, open-source contributions, or personal projects.

“It’s quite humbling to see how high the current expectations are for interns and new grads,” he added. “Companies expect them to have done material work. I think internships are critical because they build that valuable experience. You have to be working with a professor, making open source contributions or working on personal projects to distinguish yourself from the rank and file. It’s a very competitive market.”

Coulombe has seen this shift in expectations firsthand through his daughter, a computer science student who initially resisted his advice to get involved outside the classroom.

“I connected her to some recruiters and they told her the same thing,” he said. “She came back to me and said, ‘You know, Dad, I think I should actually work on some side projects.’” 

With expectations higher than ever, Coulombe believes that today’s graduates are rising to the challenge.

“Overall, I think the calibre of incoming talent that we have now is just incredible,” he said. “If I compared myself 25 years ago to the people coming in now, I wouldn’t get the job.”

PRESENTED BY

Explore open roles and opportunities on Intuit Canada’s career site.

All photos provided by Intuit.