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I am a bit late on answering this one, forgive me. I also did an episode of our podcast on this subject a while back if you are interested in more info.

So, the debate between intentionalists and functionalists is in essence a debate about the policy origins of the Holocaust but it also extends to the nature of the Nazi regime itself and ultimately about the method of analyzing and the understanding of history itself. What needs to be emphasized also is that this debate is by now settled and not current anymore. With the turn to scholarship focused more on the immediate perspectives of perpetrators and victims (with Christopher Browning's and Saul Friedländer's works respectively) the debate between intentionalists and functionalists became obsolete and is these days regarded as pretty much settled with a moderate functionalist view as advanced by Kershaw et. al. being now regarded as "standard".

To completely grasp this, a bit of context is necessary: What we now refer to as the Holocaust was called the "final solution of the Jewish question" by the Nazis and what this exactly meant in terms of concrete policy was something that happened gradually over time. The Nazis didn't start systematically murdering Jews after their take over of power in 1933. I go into this in-depth in this answer but the process that occurred can be described as follows:

The early 1930s saw a push towards a policy of both discrimination and definition of who was Jewish in the first place that culminated in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 giving a very broad definition (by family rather than by faith practiced) of who was Jewish. The latter half of the 1930s saw massive expropriation (the Aryanization of Jewish property) in conjunction with a policy of forced emigration to whichever country that was still willing to take in refugees and emigrants form Germany. The start of the war pushed the policy further into concentration, either in certain ghettos or attempts such as the "reservation" at Nisko in Poland. In 1940 a plan that combined ghettoization and forced emigration was briefly considered in form of the Madagascar Plan (the organized expulsion of Jews to the French colony of Madagascar). This plan was already implicitly genocidal in its implications – letting thousands of Jews starve because the planners knew that the Island would not support that many people – but was also impossible to implement for reasons such as shipping capacity and the Allied navies. With the attack on the Soviet Union came the first systematic program of killing that targeted Jews. Soviet Jews, seen by the Nazis as the carriers of Bolshevism, had always been "on the list" to be killed in great numbers by the Nazi German government because of the special ideological role they occupied. Sometime after the attack on the Soviet Union, in between September and December 1941, Hitler made the decision to broaden the scope of the program of genocide from the Soviet Jews to all Jews the Germans could get a hold of. This being exemplified in the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 where a whole variety of German state agencies met to discuss the logistics of this process.

Now, the debate between intentionalists and functionalists is the specifics of this process of German anti-Jewish policy becoming more radicalized and culminating in all-encompassing genocide. Intentionalists like Karl Dietrich Bracher and Eberhard Jäckel hold the theory that it had always been Hitler's intention to commit genocide. For them, a straight road leads from the Hitler's 1922 ascension to power in the NSDAP directly to Auschwitz. They posit that all other measures that were initiated – the definition, expropriation, concentration, forced emigration – were all in service of preparing the genocide and, so to speak, "ease" both the rest of the regime and the public into it, just waiting for the right time to unleash the genocidal program. Functionalists, on the other hand, like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, hold that rather than being planned all along, the program of genocide was the result of what they call "cumulative radicalization", a process of decisions resulting from smaller initiatives in the periphery, like the Wehrmacht commander in Serbia deciding to shot the male Jews of the country, that lead ot an overall radicalization of the regime due to its internal structure. In essence, they argue that in 1940 the Nazis had not idea that they would start committing genocide next year but once some figures of authority in local and regional positions started murdering Jews out of their own initiative, the regime noticed that genocide was indeed a viable way to go forward and radicalized itself.

It's important to note here that a functionalist view does by no means mean that Hitler as a person and politcian can be absolved of his responsibility of the Holocaust or that as prominent denier David Irving claims, Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust. Even the most extreme functionalist interpretation of Mommsen and Broszat still places Hitler in the center of things in that it was his leadership, success and so forth that enabled the climate that made the local initiatives of murder on the periphery possible in which the Holocaust originated.

Furthermore, when it comes to the Holocaust and its origins, what is disputed is the decision to kill the European Jews not in the Soviet Union. It is generally accepted that as soon as war against the Soviet Union was considered a possibility, the Soviet Jews were marked for death since they were in their ideological delusion perceived by the Nazis as the backbone of Communism. Thus, mass murder was always part of the regime's intentions, the only bit in question is when and how it became policy towards European Jews outside of the Soviet Union, whether by local initiatives of people working towards what they saw as Hitler's wishes (as stated in the prophesy speech e.g.) or by central order from Berlin.

The most important piece of evidence for the intentionalists was the order Hitler had supposedly given to initiate the Holocaust. Basically, up until the 90s when the Russian archives were opened a lot of Holocaust historians operated with the assumption that there was a written Hitler order for the Holocaust along the lines of the euthanasia order in 1939. Intentionalists basically assumed that in line with previous orders we know of (Göring placing Heydrich in charge of finding solutions to the "Jewish question" in 1940), there not only would be such an order but also that the basic meaning of what the in the official documents was named as the final solution did never change, i.e. it was always physical annihilation through gassing or shooting people.

Today, historians consider that the order for the Holocaust was not given in writing but rather in a private talk (probably sometime in December 1941): The experience with the euthanasia order in 1939 - it facing resistance from the the Catholic Church especially - turned the leadership off of putting such controversial orders into writing. Also, the meaning of what was considered a final solution also did change over time considerably and when Göring put Heydrich in charge of it in 1939, it primarily meant forced emigration. It is important to note here however, that all these plans the Nazis considered over time of the war did include large amounts of Jews dying. Nisko, Madgascar, the Reservation; in all these scenarios huge amounts of people were expected to perish from terrible transport and living conditions. So, physical annihilation was part of these early plans but more by letting the Jews starve and die because of disease rather than gassing or shooting them.

As for other evidence: Intentionalists used ambiguous cases to support their argument. For example, after the male Jews of Serbia had been killed in late 1941 (with Hitler's explicit approval), the women, children and old people were killed via gas van in early 1942. It is unclear how the gas van came to Belgrade, whether it was ordered by the local administration or sent there from Berlin. Both accounts are supported by testimony of the involved people. We will probably never know the definite answer on who ordered the gas van to Belgrade but where you air in this debate is influenced by how your interpretation of the events is; people taking initiative to please Hitler and the center or Hitler and the center needing to order them stuff directly.

Lastly, another wealth of evidence comes from post-war testimony. I won't go too far into that because that is a chapter of its own but here the problem is that when people like Eichmann claim, they were ordered to do certain stuff, how much of this narrative is the truth and how much of this narrative is to exonerate themselves.