Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Platform

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. Teams are in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto's Payroll Platform team, building backend product infrastructure that powers payroll experiences across Gusto. This is a fully backend role focused on designing and evolving internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll. You'll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar on how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company.

The Payroll Platform team builds the foundational services that make payroll possible at Gusto. Our customers are internal product teams building payroll, time, contractor, and accountant experiences, as well as external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll. We focus on creating reliable, performant, and well-designed APIs that abstract away payroll complexity and enable teams to move faster with confidence. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain.

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams.
• Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution.
• Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases.
• Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as we scale payroll processing for hundreds of thousands of businesses.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions.
• Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and documentation, and help normalize and spread effective usage across the team.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development.
• Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support multiple product teams.
• Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration.
• Strong system design skills, including experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems.
• Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage.
• Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required.

Cash compensation is targeted at $163,000/yr to $204,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000/yr to $247,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

This position is based in San Francisco, CA and is Hybrid. Employees based in San Francisco will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week. Travel to Gusto's Denver office for onboarding is required for this position.

Apply through the provided Greenhouse link.