Senior Staff Engineer Tax Platform Engineering

About Gusto

At Gusto were on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff payroll health insurance 401(k)s and HR so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver San Francisco and New York we support more than 500000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay benefits and equity (RSUs) because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role level and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

Were hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability and building the future of Gustos Tax platform. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level youll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states executing on projects and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If youre interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy join us!

About the Team:

Payroll is the beating heart of Gustos business. The Tax team ensures Gusto customers remain compliant and confident by managing every aspect of payroll taxesincluding setup calculation payments filings and year-end communications. We design seamless end-to-end experiences that simplify complex processes and build the infrastructure that keeps taxes accurate and on time. By combining reliable systems with thoughtful design our team makes one of the most complicated parts of running a business simple for employers. Tax is a stabilizing pace layer at Gusto: continuity and trust are paramount change is deliberate and impact is wide. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers.

Heres what youll do day-to-day:

• Design build and test the platform that supports tax compliance for millions of people
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering Product Management Design Data Science Compliance Operations and other cross-functional teams
• Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services tools and APIs you build.
• Build guardrails into the Tax platform that enable Gusto to safely leverage agentic AI to interact with tax concepts in a way that ensures compliance accuracy stability and reliability.
• Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
• Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your teams domain area in alignment with team and group-level OKRs
• Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
• Lead improvements to incident response processes tooling and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness
• Mentor and develop engineers on your team working to create holistic and scalable solutions. Track record of elevating team capabilities through pairing code review and knowledge sharing.

Heres what were looking for:

• Successful applicants have at least 10 years of experience
• Experience in designing and developing robust distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
• Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling refactoring and optimizing legacy products
• Experience architecting building and testing large-scale production level code
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
• Enthusiasm for a highly collaborative test-driven environment
• Able to build maintainable structured well-documented code
• Experience building fault-tolerant mission-critical software
• Experience building products in highly regulated and high risk domains
• Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll Taxes or Compliance
• Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs Agents) and their shortcomings / benefits
• Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time.
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails Typescript and React

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $223000/yr to $278000/yr for San Francisco. 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.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject toGustos Applicant Privacy Notice.