Senior Staff Engineer, Expansion Experiences

Gusto, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

10h•$191,000 - $275,000

About The Position

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Expansion Experiences team, you will own outcomes across the customer expansion funnel, from identifying a customer's need to realizing ongoing value from the product or service they adopt. You will shape technical approaches and architecture for recommendations and conversion journeys, making them a foundation for future initiatives. The role offers substantial autonomy to partner with Product, Design, and Data Science on priorities, experiments, and technical investments. The work aims to increase retained and expansion revenue for a company serving more than 500,000 small businesses. Gusto handles payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for small businesses. The company has teams and offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, and expects employees based near its offices to work onsite on designated days approximately two to three days per week, or more depending on the role. Travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required. Approved work from outside a Gusto office requires a secure, reliable, consistent internet connection. The position's targeted cash compensation is $191,000–$240,000 in Denver and most remote locations, or $225,000–$275,000 in San Francisco and New York; stock equity is additional. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Requirements

Typically 10 or more years of software development experience, including building and shipping full-stack, customer-facing products at scale.
Product-minded approach focused on customer problems and meaningful metrics; ability to work independently with product, design, and data partners.
Ability to move quickly and execute with high quality by shipping, measuring, and iterating.
Experience owning multi-quarter initiatives end to end, from early concept through measurable business impact.
Comfort with ambiguity and ability to lead peers through influence without relying on formal authority.
Experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability work, and technical ownership of a product area.
Track record of mentoring engineers and helping teams scale their impact, including delegating appropriately scoped work.
Track record of proactively identifying technical or product opportunities and building a case to prioritize them.
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver product capabilities.
Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code.
Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience in, or interest in working with, Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, and TypeScript.
Experience in a growth, lifecycle, or conversion-focused context such as onboarding, upsell flows, personalization, or recommendations, or demonstrated ability to think in these terms.

Responsibilities

Own outcomes across the full expansion funnel, rather than only a single surface or feature.
Shape the technical approach and architecture for recommendations and conversion journeys so they can support future initiatives.
Make scope decisions under time constraints, ship the simplest version that tests an idea, and iterate based on results.
Design experiments and use ambiguous or noisy data to determine what to scale or stop.
Partner independently with Product, Design, and Data Science to shape the roadmap.
Provide pragmatic technical direction, conduct strong code reviews, and mentor engineers.
Scope work and delegate it to other engineers when it is ready to hand off.
Own multi-quarter initiatives from early concept through measurable business impact.
Identify technical or product opportunities proactively and build the case for prioritizing them.