Staff Software Engineer, Gusto
Developer Productivity, Ruby on Rails
$190-250k
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
$190-250k
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To grow the small business economy.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of professional software development experience with solid architecture and systems thinking skills
- Deep working knowledge of Ruby on Rails, or equivalent backend experience (Python, Go, TypeScript) with a genuine willingness to go deep on Rails
- Experience building developer tooling, shared libraries, or platform infrastructure that serves 10s or 100s of engineers
- Comfort working with colleagues as your "customers," you're a great communicator who can plan, document, consult, and collaborate effectively on changes that affect how others work
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, or similar) and enthusiasm for applying AI to scale infrastructure and automation work
- Experience with some combination of: type systems (Sorbet/RBS), CI/CD pipelines, code generation, linting/static analysis, or framework upgrades at scale
- A tendency toward making things observable, repeatable, and automated, you'd rather build the machine than do it by hand twice
What the job involves
- As an engineer on the Developer Productivity Rails team, you'll work at the heart of Gusto's core applications, championing Ruby, Rails, and related technologies so that hundreds of product engineers can ship faster and more confidently
- You'll modernize foundational systems, build reusable tools and patterns, and drive automation (including AI-assisted tooling) that scales our Rails applications as the number of services and engineers grows
- This is high-leverage work: the improvements you make ripple nearly every engineering team at Gusto
- The Developer Productivity Rails team empowers Gusto engineers by keeping our core applications modern, up to date, and productive to work in
- We own Rails and Ruby upgrades across all services, maintain shared libraries and CI infrastructure, and build the tooling and standards that make it easy to do the right thing, for humans and AI agents alike
- We're a small team with an outsized ownership footprint, which means a high degree of autonomy and freedom to shape how engineering works at Gusto
- Seek out and solve inefficiencies in the tooling, frameworks, and feedback mechanisms available to product engineers to improve developer productivity
- Advance Rails and Ruby upgrades across Gusto's core applications, developing automation and AI-assisted tooling to scale this work across a growing number of services
- Build and maintain reusable libraries, gems, and patterns that commonize best practices so teams are productive from day one in any service
- Steward and improve shared CI tooling, including Danger, Sorbet, RuboCop, database migration checks, and other developer-facing guardrails
- Collaborate with product engineering teams as their partner and "internal customer advocate," understanding their pain points and shipping solutions iteratively
- Contribute to observable standards and scorecards that make the health and maturity of our services visible and actionable
- Leverage AI tools (Cursor, Claude, automation agents) as part of your daily workflow and help shape how AI augments developer productivity across the organization
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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