Senior Staff Software Engineer, Gusto
Platform
$191-252k
+ Stock equity. Salary dependent on location
2-3 days a week in office
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
Open for applications
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$191-252k
+ Stock equity. Salary dependent on 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
- We are looking for a talented Engineering Lead with experience in building and managing secure authentication and authorization systems
- Experience: 12+ years of software development experience, with a strong focus on platform engineering and expertise in Ruby on Rails
- Technical Expertise: Solid understanding of platform engineering, including system design, performance optimization, and scaling backend systems. Strong experience in backend technologies and tools, especially Ruby on Rails
- Operational Excellence: Experience in building and maintaining highly available and reliable systems, with a focus on operational excellence. This includes automated monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and ensuring system health in production environments
- API Design & Integration: Experience in designing and integrating APIs, ensuring smooth communication between different components of a platform while maintaining system integrity and performance
- Tools & Frameworks: Familiarity with tools and frameworks commonly used in platform engineering, such as Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and other technologies that help scale modern systems
- Leadership: Proven experience leading platform engineering efforts, driving the development of large, complex systems, and managing projects end-to-end
- Data Modeling: Advanced experience with data modeling, building and maintaining relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), and designing systems that are maintainable and easily extensible
- Problem-Solving: Ability to address complex technical challenges related to platform engineering, including optimizing system performance, ensuring reliability, and scaling systems to handle large traffic
- Customer Focus: A passion for building solutions that meet customer needs and deliver memorable experiences
- Effective Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and collaborate effectively across teams
What the job involves
- In this role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable authorization management systems, ensuring the security of user data, and enabling seamless user experiences
- You will collaborate closely with product, security, and engineering teams to integrate robust authorization mechanisms into our platform
- Platform Engineering: Design and implement scalable and reliable platform solutions to support Gusto’s product suite. This includes engineering robust backend systems that scale efficiently, integrating technologies like GraphQL, Sidekiq, and Kafka to optimize data handling, background job processing, and event-driven workflows
- Operational Excellence: Drive operational excellence by ensuring that the platform is highly available, reliable, and performs well in production environments. Focus on building automated monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization processes to ensure systems run smoothly
- Hands-on Coding & Development: Contribute directly to the codebase, primarily using Ruby on Rails and GraphQL, ensuring high-quality, maintainable code while supporting the performance and reliability of Gusto’s platform
- Code Quality & Reviews: Actively participate in code reviews, providing clear and constructive feedback to maintain high engineering standards, and ensuring the team’s code quality continues to improve over time
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with Product Management, Design, Security and Business teams to identify platform requirements, develop innovative solutions, and ensure seamless integration with other product components
- Platform Performance & Scalability: Focus on optimizing platform performance, working on improving load balancing, caching strategies, and database performance to ensure the platform can scale with increasing traffic and customer demands
- Mentorship & Leadership: Mentor junior engineers, helping them solve technical challenges, pair programming as needed and growing careers of team members. Take the lead on complex projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery of platform solutions
- Rapid Prototyping & Feature Launches: Prototype, iterate, and deploy new platform features quickly, contributing to an agile development process that brings value to customers faster
- Foster a Collaborative Environment: Build a collaborative team culture that encourages creativity and innovation, ensuring a positive environment that enables engineers to thrive
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
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 values
- Embody a service mindset - Never stop advocating for the needs of others
- Dream big, then make it real - Be ambitious. Show and do, rather than tell and talk
- Be proud of the how - Ensure deep integrity in everything you do
- Embrace an ownership mentality - Take initiative to leave things better than you found them
- Debate then commit - Share openly, question respectfully, and once a decision is made, commit fully
Company HQ
Central Waterfront, San Francisco, CA
Articles
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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