Staff Software Engineer Payroll Platform

About Gusto

At Gusto were on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stufflike payroll health insurance 401(k)s and HRso owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver San Francisco and New York were proud to support more than 400000 small businesses across the country and were building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About the Role:

Were hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gustos Payroll Platform team where youll build 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. Youll 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.

About the Team:

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.

Heres what youll do day-to-day:

• 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.

Heres what were looking for:

• • 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

Please note that travel to Gustos Denver office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163000/yr to $204000/yr in Denver & most remote locations and $197000/yr to $247000/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.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver San Francisco and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be 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 Gustos subsidiary whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both 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. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds not just because its the right thing to do but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race color religion national origin age sex (including pregnancy childbirth or related medical conditions) marital status ancestry physical or mental disability genetic information veteran status gender identity or expression sexual orientation or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable federal state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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