Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pay Group Engineering
About The Position
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 system. 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!
Requirements
- Successful applicants have at least 12+ years of experience
- Experience in designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
- Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
- Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code
- An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
- Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
- Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
- Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software
- Experience creating prompt libraries for common patterns
- Mentors engineers on effective AI usage.
- Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs, Cursor, Copilot, Agents) and their shortcomings / benefits
- Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests, summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time.
- Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers
Nice To Haves
- Experience building products in highly regulated domains is desired, but not required
- Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
- Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React
Responsibilities
- 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
- Build the software platform that powers multiple 1st and 3rd party products and serves millions of businesses.
- 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
- Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your domain in alignment with team and group-level OKRs
- Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
- Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
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
