Situated in between academia and industry, McIntosh teaches computer science graduate and undergraduate courses while also providing consulting services for major organizations like IBM, where she worked as a technical team leader to develop technologies for virtualization, cloud computing, and big data analytics. She is an expert in the Hadoop and Spark ecosystems, has been the Lead Inventor of multiple patents, acts as an advisor to start-ups and as a STEM mentor at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) and Society of Women Engineers.