Senior Staff Engineer, Gusto
Tax Platform Engineering
$223-278k
+ Equity
2-3 days a week in office
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
Be an early applicant
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$223-278k
+ Equity
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To grow the small business economy.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- We’re 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 Gusto's Tax platform
- As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll 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 you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!
- Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business
- The Tax team ensures Gusto customers remain compliant and confident by managing every aspect of payroll taxes—including 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
- 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 team’s 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
Our take
For many small businesses, vital administrative tasks such as payroll, taxes, and benefits are manual tasks that take time and energy - which many SMB owners don’t have. The co-founders of Gusto all come from small business backgrounds, which is why they created a platform that would handle employee payments, benefits administration, and compliance support specifically for small businesses.
The company may have started slowly, as the founders focused on nailing each individual aspect of Gusto’s operations, but has now skyrocketed to unicorn status with more than 400,000 customers and a multi-billion dollar valuation. And in 2021, Gusto began acquiring other companies to strengthen its offering and position in a competitive market, including the likes of Ardius, Symmetry and Guideline.
Through its continued acquisitions and fundraising efforts, the company has carved out a strong position for itself in the space. It continues to expand its platform, for example by partnering with Parafin to launch a payroll line of credit for small businesses, and more recently launching Cofounder, an AI teammate tailored to the needs of small businesses.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
45% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
May 2022
$55m
SERIES E
Aug 2021
$175m
SERIES E
Total funding: $706.3m
Company benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
- Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
- Gender-affirming care and support
- A variety of mental health resources
- Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more
- Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
Company HQ
Central Waterfront, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Joshua Reeves
(CEO & Co-Founder)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford and went onto co-found Gusto in 2011.
Tomer London
(CPO & Co-Founder)Has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Was a Researcher at Intel, and then interned at Bump Technologies. Co-founded Vizmo before co-founding Gusto in 2011.
Edward Kim
(Head of Technology & Co-Founder)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford. Was Senior Project Engineer at Volkswagen of America Electronics Research Lab and then co-founded Picwing before co-founding Gusto in 2011.
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