Staff Software Engineer, Gusto
HR Experiences
$199-247k
+ RSUs
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
$199-247k
+ RSUs
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
- Compliance/HR Domain Expertise (Preferred): experience building products in regulated, compliance-heavy domains (HR, payroll, benefits, tax, or similar), especially where requirements vary by state or locality
- 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
- Actively uses agentic coding tools (for example, Claude Code or Codex) as part of your daily engineering workflow, and has used them to meaningfully accelerate yourself and others
- Experience with, or strong interest in, building agents and MCP tools — and judgment about applying them safely in domains where "mostly right" isn't good enough
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join Gusto's HR Experience team
- Half the American workforce works at a small business, and most of those businesses can't afford a real HR team
- When they hit an HR decision they don't have the expertise for — a termination, a comp change, setting a time-off policy for the first time — they either pay for expensive outside help or guess, even though the right answer depends on rules that vary across 50 states and hundreds of localities
- HR Experience is building that expertise directly into Gusto: compliant HR guidance and documentation, built natively for both the employer creating it and the employee receiving it, in a domain where the compliance bar is real — "mostly right" isn't good enough
- You'll also help drive the other half of HR Experience's mission: using AI to make Gusto's human HR Partners faster and more effective, so more small businesses can get real HR support without needing to hire their own HR team
- 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 small businesses get HR infrastructure they can actually rely on — join us!
- Design, build, and test across Gusto's HR experience — the employer-facing document and guidance tools, and the employee-facing side of that same experience
- Build AI tools and agents that help scale Gusto's HR Partners team, automating the compliance and document workflows human HR partners handle today
- 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
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
- 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
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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