Staff Software Engineer, PEO Benefits

Gusto, Inc.•Quinte West, ON

53d•$163,000 - $247,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is seeking experienced full-stack software engineers to join its PEO Benefits team. This role involves building the systems for Gusto's new Professional Employer Organization (PEO) offering, which includes a national Master Health Plan designed to reduce healthcare costs for small businesses. The position offers greenfield scope, allowing for foundational architectural decisions. The Staff Software Engineer will operate across the full product lifecycle, from feature specification and design to launch and iteration, including frontend and backend development, influencing product direction, and post-launch ownership. The role emphasizes combining technical craft with real-world impact to support small businesses.

Requirements

8+ years of software development experience.
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
Experience driving large, cross-functional projects end-to-end through ambiguity, including scoping, sequencing, and unblocking.
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities.
Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams.
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
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.

Nice To Haves

3+ years of experience with PEO, with direct experience building PEO flows in a high-growth environment.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and test the Gusto PEO Benefits experience, including benefits shopping, plan recommendation flows, carrier integrations, MCP tools, and agent automation for operational and customer support processes.
Mentor other engineers in solving complex technical problems within intricate domains at a large scale.
Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications globally.
Collaborate with Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to identify customer pain points, develop solutions, and launch features.
Build products that customers genuinely appreciate.