Staff Software Engineer, Gusto
Payroll Platform
$163-247k
Salary varies depending on location. Stock equity is additional
1-2 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. Stock equity is additional
1-2 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To grow the small business economy.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
- Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support multiple product teams
- Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration
- Strong system design skills, including experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems
- Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage
- Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
What the job involves
- We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto’s Payroll Platform team, where you’ll build backend product infrastructure that powers payroll experiences across Gusto
- This is a fully backend role focused on designing and evolving internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll
- You’ll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar on how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company
- The Payroll Platform team builds the foundational services that make payroll possible at Gusto. Our customers are internal product teams building payroll, time, contractor, and accountant experiences, as well as external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll
- We focus on creating reliable, performant, and well-designed APIs that abstract away payroll complexity and enable teams to move faster with confidence. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain
- Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams
- Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution
- Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases
- Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals
- Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as we scale payroll processing for hundreds of thousands of businesses
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions
- Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and documentation, and help normalize and spread effective usage across the team
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 400,000 customers and a multi-billion dollar valuation. And 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 has seen it reach key profitability benchmarks. It continues to expand its platform, most recently partnering with Parafin to launch a payroll line of credit for small businesses. With a growing suite of services and a clear focus on supporting small businesses through changing economic conditions, Gusto looks set to sustain its momentum and further strengthen its position in the HR and payroll technology market.
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
- Health and Wellbeing: 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.
- Time Away: It's important to take time away for yourself or to take care of your family. Gusto offers paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more!
- Free meals and refreshments: If you work at one of our offices, enjoy food, drinks, and snacks— on us. Conversation and community is an added bonus!
- Perks:
Company HQ
Central Waterfront, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Joshua Reeves
(Co-Founder & CEO)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford and went onto co-found Gusto in 2011.
Tomer London
(Co-Founder & 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
(Co-Founder & 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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