Meet Shagun
Shagun is a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer on the business tax team, enabling small business owners to file their returns with speed and confidence. In her role, she collaborates with cross-functional teams, spearheads comprehensive initiatives, and continuously learns new technologies, which enhances team performance through mentorship and technical expertise.
Describe your work within your role at Intuit.
Tell us about your career journey.
I joined Intuit in 2020 on the Tech Culture team, responsible for building tools to foster broad collaboration and boost developer productivity. It was amazing to not only see the importance Intuit places on a strong developer culture, but also contribute to improving it.
Later, I moved to the tax team because I wanted to work on a custom-facing product and partner more closely with product and design. While working with the tax team, I learned to move with speed and iterate quickly. I gained expertise in front-end development and working cross-functionally.
Now that I’m working within the business tax team, I get to operate at the center of both tax and small business growth - tackling harder problems, working more cross-functionally, and growing my skills and my team.
What do you love about Intuit?
At Intuit, I have always been encouraged to bring my whole self to work! On my team, my varied experiences translate into bringing unique perspectives to the table. I’ve also had opportunities because of my “non-engineering” skills and interests. I have taught at Dev@Intuit, our new-hire training program, for almost 3 and a half years.
I’ve also co-chaired the Open Source track, leading a team of 14 volunteers, and organized an open source themed hackathon at Grace Hopper Conference in 2022 - one of the world’s largest tech conferences for women. All of which started because I was bold and vocal about my interests! In turn, that has expanded my network and improved my technical brand.
What are you most proud of?
I love the culture of broad, open collaboration at Intuit. We truly go wherever the customer problem takes us! Our teams collaborate boundaryless-ly so that we can iterate quickly, tackle the most impactful problems, and build with reuse in mind.
Because of this culture, I've been able to tackle different areas of our stack and develop my skills broadly. I've built data pipelines, contributed to back-end services, and also delivered many front-end experiences.
What's been your favorite project so far?
One of my favorite projects I’ve worked on recently is the “K1 Downloads”. The process to extract and create K1 packages is very time-consuming and error-prone. You have to manually slice the tax return, and there isn’t much guidance available on how to do so. With this project, we were able to automate this process to generate those packages at the click of a button! Saving our small business customers a ton of time and effort.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
The best advice I’ve been given was to build my career based on the skills I want, and not on the skills I have. Just because you are “good” at something, doesn’t mean that you have to like it, or do it at all. And, to seek opportunities that excite you, because a vast majority of learning happens on the job.
I want to share this article on Being "Glue" that I recommend all women in tech read. It shares similar advice to what I’ve shared!