Sales Engineer

Gusto, Inc.•Scottsdale, AZ

2d•$88,000 - $181,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Sales Engineer is a highly customer-facing technical role at the intersection of engineering, solution architecture, agentic AI, and customer delivery. The role owns technical discovery for ongoing opportunities from end to end, then scopes and builds production-ready solutions in close partnership with clients. Solutions must work with real tax and jurisdiction data and deliver measurable customer outcomes, such as hours saved, tickets deflected, and reduced risk. The Sales Engineer works with both technical and executive stakeholders, moving quickly from problem discovery to proof of concept and from there to production deployment. The role involves building and embedding agentic and multi-agent systems, resolving data and compliance blockers, and ensuring deployed work is live and generating customer value. It also contributes reusable implementation patterns, deployment documentation, and structured feedback to product and go-to-market teams. Gusto has offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City, and its subsidiary Symmetry has an office in Scottsdale. Employees based in these locations are expected to work in the office on designated days approximately two to three days per week or more depending on role. When approved to work elsewhere, employees need a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection and are expected to maintain regular, predictable attendance and responsiveness.

Requirements

At least 5 years of hands-on experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, AI Engineer, Implementation Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Consultant.
Demonstrated track record of shipping production systems in ambiguous, client-facing environments.
Experience with REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven systems, authentication patterns, data modeling, idempotency, and failure modes.
Experience building production systems in highly regulated categories, with sufficient payroll, tax, or compliance knowledge to work directly with a client's compliance team.
Experience with agentic workflows beyond prototypes, including MCP or function-calling patterns and evaluation and reliability practices.
Strong technical discovery skills and ability to navigate ambiguity.
Ability to scope technical solutions from ambiguous opportunities, build business cases that support subscriptions, and deliver reusable patterns.
Ability to present to and influence audiences ranging from individual engineers to executive sponsors.
Entrepreneurial approach, enthusiasm for Gusto's mission, and empathy for clients whose compliance work is being automated.

Nice To Haves

Experience with an HR or payroll platform's integration surface.
Experience with enterprise procurement or security review processes.
Experience with MEDDPICC-style deal frameworks.

Responsibilities

Provide Sales with early technical feasibility assessments for ambiguous enterprise opportunities and own scoping of compliance challenges after qualification.
Gather requirements and define complex, ambiguous problems so Sales, Product, and Engineering can align.
Build working proof-of-concepts to demonstrate feasibility, tailoring explanations and solutions to audiences from integration engineers to payroll tax executives.
Develop a business case for each deployment, including hours saved, risk reduced, and simplified compliance.
Embed with clients and personally build production code that runs their compliance decisions.
Diagnose and resolve data issues, jurisdiction mapping problems, tax ID reconciliation, and other blockers to production.
Keep technical teams and business stakeholders aligned as requirements evolve, and communicate scope changes.
Deliver completed builds and runbooks that Client Success can operate independently.
Feed structured information from sales and implementation work into product and go-to-market strategy, including infrastructure gaps.
Create implementation playbooks, solution patterns, demo flows, and deployment documentation to accelerate future deployments.