Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, Gusto offers competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) to all full-time employees.

We're looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer to help evolve how Gusto stores and accesses data as the company scales. You'll build a platform for provisioning and accessing new datastores, evaluate highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems, and strengthen the resilience of existing databases.

The Datastores Infrastructure Engineering team designs, builds, and operates the data platforms powering Gusto's product: Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, and Redis. The team is building self-service tooling for new datastores and exploring highly available, horizontally scalable systems.

• Build tooling and platform for provisioning and accessing new datastores, and evaluate highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems.
• Take ownership of Kafka, including capacity planning, partitioning, performance tuning, and reliability at scale, and help stand up and operate new non-relational datastores like DynamoDB.
• Coordinate migrations and topology changes across MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Kafka with minimal disruption.
• Drive efficiency and reliability improvements through query and consumer optimization, caching strategies, and workload management.
• Participate in on-call and drive long-term reductions in operational burden.
• Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems, with deep hands-on expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and/or non-relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar) in production at scale.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes—and proven experience coordinating migrations or topology changes in production.
• Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, including caching systems like Redis/ValKey and streaming platforms like Kafka.
• Strong communication skills and ability to operate in an AI-native environment.
• Bonus: Experience with self-hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (e.g., TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, or Citus), horizontal sharding, or service/vertical extraction.
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale.

The cash compensation for this role is targeted at $222,000-$245,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York, and $183,000-$200,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations. Final offers are determined by multiple factors.

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