Staff / Principal

Gusto's mission is to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

You will be a key engineer focused on building and owning the systems that move money and assets through Gusto Retirement. This is a hands-on role: owning backend services and APIs end-to-end, shipping production code, and working through real financial edge cases. You will partner with product, compliance, and operations to turn complex financial requirements into reliable software.

The Financial Infrastructure team owns the core money and asset flow systems for Gusto Retirement. The team works on payments, settlements, tax and compliance integrations, and more.

• Design, build, and ship services and APIs for money movement and financial integrations
• Work on payments, settlements, reconciliation, and corrections involving real customer funds
• Build and support critical workflows like payroll integration, KYB/KYC, 401k loans, billing and invoicing, and IRA
• Partner with product, compliance, and operations to scope work and deliver production-ready solutions
• Debug production issues and improve reliability, observability, and operational tooling
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with shared systems and platforms
• Mentor other engineers to help solve complex technical problems at scale
• Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms
• Strong experience with services, APIs, and data-heavy workflows
• Experience working on financial systems, payments, or other high-correctness domains (or the ability to ramp quickly)
• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including production support and operational work
• Experience working closely with PMs and cross-functional partners
• Pragmatic, execution-focused approach
• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate
• Ability to mentor engineers
• Experience with Ruby on Rails (or a comparable backend framework)

• Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
• Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks

Cash compensation is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Stock equity is additional. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

This role is available in multiple locations with varying work styles: Austin, TX - Remote; Burlingame, CA - Hybrid; Chicago, IL - Remote; Denver, CO - Hybrid; Los Angeles, CA - Remote; Miami, FL - Remote; New York, NY - Hybrid; San Francisco, CA - Hybrid; Seattle, WA - Remote. Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week. Travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required.