Principal Software Engineer, Gusto
Payroll
$222-299k
Salary varies by 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
$222-299k
Salary varies by location
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where work empowers a better life.
Role
Who you are
- If you’re excited about solving complex, high-impact problems and want to contribute to a product that touches the lives of millions, we’d love to have you on board!
- 15+ years of professional software development experience
- Experience in scaling Engineering organizations with a focus on individual and team development
- Experience building and maintaining resilient backend systems to support customer-facing products
- Experience in highly cross-functional environments for highly complex products
- Experience as tech lead, overseeing projects across multiple teams
- Experience in optimizing existing systems for performance, reliability, and scalability
- Experience developing and maintaining RESTful APIs, GraphQL endpoints, and backend services, ensuring seamless integration with frontend systems and third-party services
- Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
- Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
What the job involves
- As the Principal Engineer for the Contractors team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Gusto’s flagship Payroll product—one of the core pillars of our platform
- You will design, build, and scale the capabilities that power essential experiences for our customers
- Working collaboratively with product managers, designers, and other engineers, you will deliver impactful features that meet customer needs and elevate user experiences
- As a Gusto Engineer at this level, you’ll guide projects end-to-end—shaping initial feature specifications, driving architectural decisions to bring systems closer to their desired end states, executing on complex initiatives, and maintaining code that powers mission-critical functionality
- Beyond technical contributions, you’ll help define and contribute to the broader strategy of how Gusto continues to build and scale its Payroll product
- The Contractors team empowers businesses to onboard and pay contractors in 120+ countries with ease and speed
- This includes critical functionalities such as payroll setup, preparation, and submission, historical reporting, time tracking, and shift scheduling
- As a key member of this team, you’ll have the opportunity to make a profound impact on both the product and the customers who depend on it daily
- Architect, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and resilient backend systems to support Gusto’s Payroll products
- Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Pay Group, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals
- 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
- Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions
- Drive the product development process from concept to launch, delivering delightful products that make payroll, taxes, and compliance simple and easy
- Engage in a highly supportive environment,t working with others to drive productivity and innovation
- Continuously stay up-to-date with backend technologies and methodologies, advancements in AI and Machine Learning, and apply this knowledge to our projects
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 three co-founders of Gusto – all coming from small business backgrounds – collaborated on a Fintech company 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 200,000 customers and a multi-billion dollar valuation. In 2021, Gusto began acquiring other companies to strengthen its offering and its position in a competitive market, including two other fintech startups, Ardius and Symmetry.
Through its continued acquisitions and fundraising efforts, the company has carved out a strong position for itself in the space. Although Gusto has found itself impacted by the macroeconomic situation, through the significant effect it has had on its clientele, the company still appears positive for the future after raising funds in 2023 that will see it reach key profitability benchmarks. It continues to consolidate its platform, for example by integrating with OpenComp to grant its users access to the company's Compensation Intelligence Platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
45% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
May 2022
$55m
SERIES E
Aug 2021
$175m
SERIES E
Total funding: $706.1m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits, plus a variety of mental health resources
- Flexible vacation - Gusties are encouraged to take the time off they need to continue doing great work
- Fertility treatments, parental leave, pregnancy termination, caregiving, gender-affirming surgery, hormone treatments, transgender-inclusive services, and more
- If you work at one of our homebases, enjoy food, drinks, and good conversation — on us
- Celebrate 5 or 10 years at Gusto and take a month off to recharge
- Take advantage of internet, phone, commuter, and wellness stipends each month, along with a WFH stipend and cash for anniversaries
Company HQ
Central Waterfront, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Joshua Reeves
(CEO)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford and went onto co-found Gusto in 2011.
Tomer London
(CPO)Has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Was a Researcher at Intel, and then interned at Bump Technologies. Co-founded Vizmo, a mobile self-service technologies company, in 2008. Co-founded Gusto in 2011.
Edward Kim
(Head of Engineering)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford. Was Senior Project Engineer at Volkswagen of America Electronics Research Lab and then co-founded Picwing, a printed photos company, in 2008. Co-founded Gusto in 2011.
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