Senior Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll , Developer Experience
About The Position
As Senior Staff Staff Software Engineer on the Embedded Payroll team acts as a technical leader shaping how developers build on Gusto’s payroll platform. The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and developer experience. It combines hands-on work in the codebase with setting direction for tools, interfaces, and workflows used by internal teams and external partners. Success requires strong technical judgment, empathy for developers and solution architects, and the ability to turn friction into scalable platform improvements.
Requirements
- 12+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated ownership of organization-wide engineering initiatives and contributions to scaling engineering organizations.
- Deep backend engineering expertise, including experience operating large, production-grade systems, with comfort working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic technical tradeoffs.
- Proven experience designing APIs, platforms, or developer tools with developers as the primary customer, with strong attention to usability, documentation, error handling, and end-to-end developer experience.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise the technical bar across teams, and provide guidance on ambiguous problems and competing priorities.
- Strong business acumen, with the ability to align technical direction to business priorities and clearly communicate constraints, tradeoffs, and needs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Curiosity and effectiveness in leveraging intelligence, automation, and experimentation to design, ship, and operate reliable, partner-facing payroll APIs at scale.
Responsibilities
- Identify high-leverage opportunities to improve developer experience across our APIs, tooling, documentation, and workflows.
- Partner closely with internal product, solution architect, and engineering teams to define a vision for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll.
- Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and influence platform direction.
- Design and evolve APIs, abstractions, and interfaces with a focus on clarity, consistency, and long-term maintainability.
- Build and maintain developer-facing tools, libraries, and internal frameworks that improve velocity and reliability.
- Lead by example through hands-on development, shipping clean, tested, and well-designed code.
- Set and promote best practices for reliability, observability, and backwards compatibility in developer-facing systems.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
1,001-5,000 employees
