Staff Software Engineer, Platform Orchestration

Gusto, Inc. • San Francisco, CA

7h • Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto's Platform Orchestration team is rebuilding how engineers ship at Gusto — turning operational toil into a product-grade self-service platform that AI agents can drive end-to-end. We sit at the intersection of Infrastructure Engineering, Developer Productivity, Security, and Product Engineering, and we enable self-service infrastructure capabilities through a Backstage-based Developer Portal and a Crossplane-based Platform Orchestrator. We automate as much as possible — safe rollouts of infrastructure and application changes, approval-based workflows, and the exposure of our entire toolchain to AI agents. We're embarking on a multi-year strategic effort to shift operational tasks into a product-driven platform so the broader Infrastructure group can focus on the future state of our systems.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience with modern programming languages, ideally Golang, Ruby, and/or TypeScript
• 5+ years of experience with Kubernetes, ideally using Crossplane to manage Infrastructure as Code
• Hands-on experience with AI-agent coding tools (Claude Code or similar) and demonstrated ability to design tooling for agentic consumption — MCPs, structured CLIs, documented tool contracts — beyond using AI as a chat companion
• Strong work ethic and self-starter who finds a way to operate effectively amidst ambiguity
• Systems-thinking approach to complex systems; identifies small changes that create big impact
• Resilient problem solver capable of prioritizing work that serves both immediate peers and the entire Gusto customer base
• Effective communicator who can simplify complex topics and communicate persuasive ideas

Responsibilities

• Design and implement an internal platform for engineers to build and deploy production-grade systems in a self-service manner
• Establish standards and build deterministic automation while optimizing for user accessibility and system reliability
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Developer Productivity, and Security teams to deliver capabilities that delight our internal users
• Build the AI-agent surface for our platform — MCPs, Claude skills, and structured tool catalogs that let agents drive infrastructure and deployment workflows safely on behalf of internal users
• Iterate on the internal-platform UX with the same product instincts you'd apply to a customer-facing product — measure adoption, listen for friction, and ship improvements
• Drive paved-road-vs-exception decisions: when to harden a self-service path, when to make a one-off accommodation, and when to redirect to a different supported workflow
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting the deployment of platform services and the management of underlying infrastructure

Benefits

• competitive base pay
• benefits
• equity (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed