Staff Software Engineer, Gusto
PEO Benefits
$163-247k
Salary varies depending on location
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
$163-247k
Salary varies depending on location
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To grow the small business economy.
Role
Who you are
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
- PEO Expertise (Preferred): 3+ years of experience with PEO, with direct experience building PEO flows in a high-growth environment
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
- Experience driving large, cross-functional projects end-to-end through ambiguity — scoping, sequencing, and unblocking without needing the problem pre-broken-down; aligning multiple stakeholders and working with multiple teams
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
- Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
Desirable
- Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails
- Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
- Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
What the job involves
- We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join Gusto’s PEO Benefits team
- Gusto is standing up a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) — one of the biggest new bets in the company — and Benefits is the anchor of the offering. At the core is a national Master Health Plan that can unlock ~20–25% lower healthcare costs for small businesses through pooled purchasing power, something most PEOs can't pull off in year one. You'd be joining the engineering team building the systems that make that real
- This is rare greenfield scope inside a company with real scale and real customers. You get to make foundational architectural decisions, not maintain someone else's
- As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. That means writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships
- If you're drawn to work that combines technical craft with real-world impact — helping power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us!
- Design, build, and test the Gusto PEO Benefits experience - the benefits shopping and plan-recommendation flows, carrier integrations, MCP tools, agents that automate operational and customer support processes
- Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
- Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
- Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch daily
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
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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