Staff / Principal

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. The company has teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Owns full-stack features independently — from technical design through implementation, testing, and production monitoring — with light oversight.

• Design, build, and maintain features for the HRX Engineering (HR Experience) product surface
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code across the stack
• Participate in code review, sprint planning, and retros
• Partner with product and design to translate requirements into technical solutions
• Help monitor and improve the reliability, performance, and quality of shipped features
• Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response for owned systems
• Provide technical guidance and code-review mentorship to less-tenured engineers

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including full-stack work
• Demonstrated ability to design, build, and ship features spanning frontend, backend, and data layer with minimal oversight
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language/framework (e.g., Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python/Django) and one modern frontend framework (e.g., React, TypeScript)
• Solid understanding of relational databases — schema design, migrations, and query performance
• Comfortable owning a project end-to-end: scoping, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, and monitoring
• Strong grounding in software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, automated testing, CI/CD
• Experience partnering cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and other engineers
• Clear written and verbal communication, including technical design docs

• Experience in HR tech, payroll, or fintech domains
• Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs
• Exposure to accessibility (a11y) best practices

Cash compensation for this role is targeted at $197,000–$247,000 for New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise.

This role is based in New York, NY and is Hybrid. Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City are expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).

Apply via the Gusto Greenhouse job board link.