Staff Software Engineer

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on customer-facing products, developing features and iterating across our platform. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll oversee projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, building backend APIs, writing frontend code, and overseeing ongoing improvements for deployed features. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

Here’s what you’ll do day to day:

• Architect, build, and test Gusto’s product suite the spans across Payroll, Benefits, HR, Time, Tax Credits, and more

• Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale

• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world

• Collaborate with our Product Management and Design teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch daily

• Build a product that our customers genuinely love

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience

• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale

• Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain

• Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders

• Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails

• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact

• Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your product area

• Passion for creating memorable experiences for customers

• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment

• Able to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code

Preferred:

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Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities.

•
Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams.

Please note that travel to Gusto's Denver office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000/yr to $204,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, $198,000/yr to $247,000/yr for San Francisco, New York & Seattle and $175,000(CAD)/yr to $219,000(CAD)/yr in Canada. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.