Senior Staff Software Engineer, Gusto Agent & Partner Experiences (API)

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Agent & Partner Experiences team, you will be a key technical leader responsible for influencing the team and broader organization as we build and scale our platform. You'll do this through a combination of hands-on development in our complex Ruby on Rails codebase and guiding others to deliver a high quality platform experience. You’ll sit at the bridge between our API and AI world - turning a payroll platform built for developers into one that agents can reason about and act through.

Gusto Agent & Partner Experiences is a platform that allows developers to embed payroll directly into their own software using our APIs and allows AI agents to act on payroll on a customer’s behalf. Our vision is to enable anyone to build the best payroll product for their end customers - powering payroll for small and medium businesses across a variety of industries, from vertical SaaS to fintech and neobanks to AI-native products.

• Identify and solve high-impact problems involving technical and organizational complexity that requires understanding and coordination across multiple domains.
• Design the API contracts and agent facing tools our partners and AI agents build on, including what a good interface looks like when the caller is an agent model.
• Engage directly with our developer-customers and internal agent partner to deliver a remarkable payroll product.
• Ship clean, tested, and performant code.
• Level up the craft of software engineering across the organization by providing technical guidance and mentoring.
• Inform and maintain best practices for reliability and observability for the team.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues.

• 12+ years of professional software development experience.
• Technical owner for organization-wide engineering initiatives and experience scaling engineering organizations.
• Ruby and Rails expert, comfortable working at multiple layers of abstraction.
• Designed and built platforms and public-facing APIs, with a strong understanding of reliability and performance at scale.
• Mentoring and raising the technical bar for the entire organization.
• Effective communicator, thinking in terms of business priorities and conveying technical constraints to business leaders.

• Payroll, tax or fintech experience.
• Experience designing interfaces consumed by a model - MCP servers, tool and function definitions or an integration path for AI providers.
• GraphQL at scale - writing efficient queries, building query construction and data mapping layers, and schema fluency.

Cash compensation is targeted at $213,000 to $236,000 in Denver & most remote locations, $251,000 to $278,000 in San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees 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 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.