Staff Software Engineer, Payments / Risk

Gusto•San Francisco, NY

1d•$163,000 - $247,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 400,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy . AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process. About the Role: We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join the teams behind Gusto's payments and risk platforms to serve small business owners every day. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full lifecycle of either the payments or risk system: shaping architecture early in the design process, building self-service internal features and APIs, and owning their performance long after launch. That means engineering the core business engine, enabling product teams with reliable backend services, and setting the engineering standard for those around you. If you're drawn to enabling world-class money movement or financial risk system with impact — helping power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us! About the Teams: Payments – The Payments team owns all money movement operations across Gusto's suite of products — enabling funds to move safely between partners, employers, employees, and government authorities. As a Payments Engineer, you'll build new payments capabilities across US and international markets, and help rearchitect our payments platform to scale for the future. Risk – The Risk team builds best-in-class experiences that protect Gusto and our customers from financial and reputational harm . As a Risk Engineer, you'll develop infrastructure for two core areas: bad actor prevention — stopping fraudsters from abusing Gusto's platform while reducing false positives — and credit underwriting and collections, enabling faster, broader access to credit while minimizing financial loss.

Requirements

Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
Passion for creating scalable, efficient money movement platforms for users
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new platform capabilities
Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks , applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable user impact at scale
Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your platform area
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact

Nice To Haves

Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails
Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders

Responsibilities

Design, build, and test Gusto core money movement or risk platform services – payment rails, ledgering, wallets, fraud, decisioning engine, KYC, AML, and compliance capabilities, among others
Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
Collaborate with our Product Engineering, Product Management, Data, Design, and financial operations teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch
Build platforms that engineering teams rely on, and trust to deliver products that our customers genuinely love