Principal Software Engineer, Gusto
$215-295k
Salary dependent on location. + Stock Equity
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
Be an early applicant
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$215-295k
Salary dependent on location. + Stock Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create a world where work empowers a better life.
Role
Who you are
- Successful applicants typically have at least 15+ years of experience
- Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
- Strong knowledge of data structures, data modeling, and system design
- Experience working across 3+ teams, influencing both product and team direction
- Experience working on platform products which are depended upon throughout the company
- Experience engineering, designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production
- An aptitude in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex problems, communicating technical complexity and facilitating informed tradeoffs to major stakeholders
- Experience operationalizing and scaling large interconnected production systems
- Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Experience in complex highly regulated domains
- Examples: HR, Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
What the job involves
- We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Payroll and Tax systems
- As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences
- If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!
- Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business
- Pay Group (payroll and tax) teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of the customers
- The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers, both internal and external
- Tax Accuracy: The Tax Accuracy group is responsible for gathering and maintaining the necessary information for us to pay and file taxes accurately and on time for our customers, and consists of multiple teams that cover various parts of the process
- Ledger: This team is building a payroll ledger to track accrual accounting for payroll-related money movement
- This team is starting to support the payroll domain, risk, payments, and accounting
- Engine: This team works closely with the payroll compliance team to ensure enablement of compliant pay, such as minimum wage adjustments, regular rate of pay, etc
- We enable end-to-end success of payroll processing and working with various domain teams such as tax calculations, tax setup, payments, and more
- Platform: This team is developing a new platform to be the common interface for interacting with payroll and tax data
- The payroll and tax domain is highly complex; our team exists to make it easier for other application teams to interact with the payroll and tax system
- We enable application and experience teams to deliver customer value faster by providing a scalable, flexible, performant, and highly understandable platform to integrate with
- Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Payroll Services, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals
- Design, build, and test the foundation that supports compliant payroll for millions of people
- 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
- Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build
- Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
- Continuously stay up-to-date with advancements in AI and Machine Learning, applying 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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 53 more jobs at Gusto