Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Canada

Gusto•San Francisco, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Payroll Canada team. This is a 0-to-1 opportunity to build and scale the payroll experience for Canadian businesses from the ground up. The role is primarily backend, focusing on designing and evolving services and business logic for Canadian payroll, with full-stack components where this logic surfaces to customers via GraphQL. The engineer will own complex technical problems end-to-end, collaborate with Product and Platform teams, and contribute to launching Gusto's payroll product in a new country. AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto, and team members are expected to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
Comfortable venturing into full-stack work when needed, even if your primary strength is backend
Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate development, improve code quality and build testing.
Comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible AI-assisted development workflows.
Experience working in large, complex codebases and a demonstrated ability to improve them incrementally without breaking things.
Designing, building, and testing production level code that functions at scale.
Strong systems thinking and design skills, able to build mental models of unfamiliar systems, ask the right questions, and produce clear analysis others can act on, while designing for performance, scalability, and reliability in production.
Experience collaborating across teams as a technical partner, communicating technical complexity clearly to product and design partners and helping the team navigate tradeoffs with full context
Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
Interest in or experience with payroll, tax, or compliance domains a plus

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain backend services and business logic that power Canadian payroll — calculations, compliance, remittances, and related workflows - on Gusto’s Ruby on Rails platform
Connect backend logic to the frontend through well-designed GraphQL APIs, partnering with frontend engineers on the full user experience
Own a primary domain within Payroll Canada, taking responsibility for correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution as the product and customer base grow
Act as a technical partner across Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver accurate, compliant, and customer-impacting solutions
Author and drive architecture and design documents, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals as we expand in Canada
Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and testing, and help normalize and spread effective AI usage across the team