Just finished my Intuit loop for a Senior SWE role (L5 equivalent) on the QuickBooks platform team. Three back-to-back onsites via Zoom over two days. Writing this up while it's fresh because I couldn't find a good recent breakdown when I was prepping.
System design round: 60 minutes, one interviewer who was a staff eng. The prompt was something in the neighborhood of designing a notification service for a multi-tenant SaaS product. Classic stuff on the surface, but they pushed specifically on: how do you handle tenant isolation when routing messages, what's your fan-out strategy at high volumes, and how do you deal with downstream rate limits from third-party email/SMS providers. Not a gotcha fest. They genuinely wanted to see how you reason through constraints.
What they cared about, based on follow-ups: Scalability in the context of SMB vs enterprise tenants (Intuit runs Mailchimp and Credit Karma too, so multi-product multi-scale is real for them) Data consistency under failure. They pressed hard on what happens if a notification partially delivers. Idempotency keys came up naturally. Observability. Not just design it, but how would you know if it's working. I talked about SLOs and they seemed to like that.
I would say difficulty is solidly senior-level, not Staff-level-hard. If you can talk through a reasonably complex distributed system and defend your tradeoffs, you'll be okay. It's not a LeetCode performance review, the design itself is where the signal is.
One thing I didn't expect: they asked about API versioning in the last 10 minutes. Fintech context, there are external partners who integrate against their APIs. Worth having a sentence or two on that.
Two coding rounds also in the loop. I'll post those separately. Total timeline: phone screen to offer was about 5 weeks. Happy to answer questions.