Staff / Principal

Gusto's mission is to grow the small business economy by 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).

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Core 401(k) team, you will build and own the systems that allow tens of thousands of businesses to offer and manage 401(k)s. This is a hands-on role: owning full stack services and APIs end-to-end, shipping production code, and evolving the architecture. You will partner with product, compliance, and operations to turn complex financial requirements into reliable software.

• Design, build, maintain, and ship services and features for 401(k) management.
• Identify opportunities to extend and modify the architecture of existing systems.
• Identify, codify, and evangelize engineering best practices.
• Partner with product, design, and operations to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Debug production issues and improve reliability, observability, and operational tooling.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with shared systems.
• 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.
• Comfortable working across teams and gaining influence.
• Strong experience with services and APIs.
• Strong experience with message-based systems (Sidekiq, SQS, NServiceBus, etc.).
• Experience with GraphQL.
• Good experience with large modern frontend applications (like React).
• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including production support.
• Experience working with PMs and cross-functional partners.
• Pragmatic, execution-focused approach.
• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails (or a comparable backend framework).

Cash compensation is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offers vary by experience and expertise.

Gusto has physical offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees based in those locations are 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, whose physical office is in Scottsdale. The San Francisco office expectations encompass 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.

Apply via the Gusto Greenhouse job posting.