Staff Software Engineer, Retirement AI

Gusto's mission is to grow the small business economy by handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, they support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Retirement AI team, you will ship real, user-facing AI at Gusto Retirement, owning problems end-to-end and iterating quickly. You'll work with a small, senior team to implement language-model-powered experiences.

• Design, build, and ship production features using large language models.
• Implement and integrate LLMs (prompting, tool loops, evaluation, monitoring).
• Make pragmatic architecture decisions and de-risk tricky areas.
• Partner with product and design to refine ideas and iterate on end-to-end experiences.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with existing systems.
• Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms.
• Hands-on experience implementing LLM-powered features (e.g., RAG flows, agents, tool loops, workflow automation).
• Strong engineering skills (services, APIs, data flows); comfortable coding most of the time.
• Experience running or heavily contributing to a team's execution: sprints, Jira, scoping, cross-functional coordination.
• Bias to action and clear communication with product, design, and engineering teams.
• Experienced with Ruby on Rails (or comparable language), React (or comparable library).

Cash compensation is targeted at $187,000-$234,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $227,000-$284,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Gusto has physical office spaces 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).