When Geoff Canady started out in tech in the early 2010s, the sector treated design and development as largely separate worlds.
Back then, as a San Diego, California-based graphic and web designer, Canady created the visuals, layouts, typography, and images, while developers handled the underlying code that made the pages function. But Canady soon realized he wanted more control over how his designs actually worked.
“One of the things that is common among all design technologists is that they have both the designer and developer mindset.”
Sam Anderson, Intuit
Teaching himself to code allowed him to blur the lines between design and development in his work. Instead of handing off static visuals to someone else, he could shape the entire experience—both how it looked and how it functioned. That hands-on approach not only expanded his skill set but also changed how he approached problem-solving.
“I saw an opportunity in bringing the design to life and putting it in a place where it could live and people could interact with it,” he added.
Canady’s fluency in both design and engineering unlocked new opportunities, and eventually led him to Intuit, where he now works as a Senior Design Technologist.
Intuit, the global financial technology platform behind products like TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, sees an emerging need for people like Canady who can sit at the intersection of product design, front-end development, and artificial intelligence (AI) experimentation.
The company is intentionally investing in design technologists, a developing category of work that Intuit believes will become essential with the evolution of AI.
According to Sam Anderson, Director of Intuit’s Design System, design technologists are the key to pushing AI-powered experiences beyond simple automation and into truly transformational benefits across the platform.
Anderson said Intuit is looking for developers with a strong design sensibility and designers with a keen interest in code. “There’s no perfect blend between designer and developer. But one of the things that is common among all design technologists is that they have both the designer and developer mindset.”
The role isn’t new—variations of design technologists have existed under titles like UX engineer, design engineer, or front-end specialist. The difference now is how essential the role has become in AI-driven product development.
The demand for UX professionals has seen significant growth in Canada. One 2023 study identified UX designers and researchers among the top 10 in-demand digital occupations in Canada, with an estimated 10,000 job openings in UX design across the country that year. There are currently close to 1,000 unique job postings for design technologists, and a further 1,000 for UX engineers on LinkedIn.
When hiring for this role, Intuit looks for a strong grasp of design principles and deep expertise in frontend development, but it also prioritizes candidates who understand the technology behind AI. According to Anderson, designing AI-powered experiences requires more than just great visuals or efficient code; these fluid, dynamic experiences are data-dependent, which means designers and developers can’t work in silos.
“Ten years ago, we were in this mode where new JavaScript frameworks were coming out every year,” Anderson explained. “There was all this innovation on JavaScript frameworks, and we really relied on design technologists to help define which frameworks we should even be on. We are facing the same challenge today with AI, and design technologists play a key role in helping us keep up with the rapidly changing landscape.”
Anderson added that AI is going through an explosive growth phase, and the only way for organizations like Intuit to lead through this transition is through constant experimentation.
“Unless you’re constantly tinkering and trying things, you’ll get left behind in this massive moment of disruption,” he added.
To enable that experimentation, Intuit built its own internal proprietary operating system for developing and implementing generative AI-powered solutions called GenOS. Within this framework, teams can experiment with different AI models. Instead of using just one AI tool, GenOS provides a single framework that connects to multiple large language models (LLMs), so Intuit can choose the best AI for the job.
“GenOS is a unique Intuit framework that we’ve built to provide a normalized API to our developers and designers,” Anderson explained. “It provides them with easy access to a selection of pre-approved best-in-class models, so they can iterate rapidly and with confidence.”
On top of GenOS sits GenUX, a system that helps teams design AI-powered user experiences, such as verifying AI-generated data and guiding automated workflows.
For design technologists like Canady, GenOS lets them prototype AI features, refine interactions, and ensure products like TurboTax and QuickBooks integrate AI in a way that’s helpful and useful for employees and customers. Canady describes that role as a “mix of hands-on technical work, creative problem-solving, and continuous iteration.”
Design technologists are critical as Intuit delivers AI-driven experiences across its expert platform. Anderson said Intuit employees in this role already play a crucial role in the product development cycle.
A common problem in software development is the handoff: designers create something ambitious, only for engineers to later push back when it’s too difficult to build.
AI makes this problem even trickier. A design might look great on paper, but when engineers start building, they run into problems: the AI model doesn’t behave as expected, the interaction feels clunky, or the feature isn’t feasible within existing systems.
That’s why Intuit relies on design technologists to close the gap.
One example is Canady’s work on Intuit’s Virtual Expert Platform (VEP), which uses AI to connect customers with financial experts. To make the experience more personal, VEP displays headshots of these experts, so customers know who they’re speaking with.
Getting those headshots used to be a manual and time-consuming part of Intuit’s onboarding process.
To solve this, the team integrated AI-powered face tracking into onboarding, providing real-time guidance to help experts centre their faces. Overcoming challenges like lighting variations and device differences, they refined the UX through iterative testing, ensuring seamless AI feedback on facial alignment.
By optimizing for speed and accuracy, the team eliminated the need for manual review, enabling Intuit to efficiently onboard experts at scale while maintaining high quality standards.
“Starting from the early prototypes, I was involved in every step, from the initial tech explorations and user testing phases to the actual platform integration,” Canady said.
Anderson sees this as a unique part of Intuit’s approach to working with design technologists: bringing them in early and giving them a hands-on role throughout development.
“When we incorporate design technologists further upstream, they’re looking at feasibility from the beginning,” Anderson said. “They can lay some of the groundwork so that the development team can look at the work and say, ‘We can totally nail this.’ And that results in a faster delivery.”
AI proves its value by solving actual problems, and Anderson said financial tools need to be precise, adaptable, and easy to use, particularly for consumers and businesses that rely on them to manage their money.
“By thinking strategically about where design technologists fit in, Intuit is leveraging AI to transform the lives of people and businesses that depend on them,” Anderson said.
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Explore career opportunities like the design technologist role and more on Intuit’s career site.
Photos, including the featured image of Geoff Canady (pictured right), provided by Intuit.