Staff Software Engineer, Tax Accounts

Gusto•San Francisco, NY

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're looking for a staff software engineer to join Tax Accounts — the team whose job is to make the complexity of dealing with hundreds of tax agencies disappear. We're the steward of every Gusto customer's employer and employee tax account data: the registrations, authorizations, rates, and setup that let us withhold, pay, and file correctly on their behalf. Get it right and businesses stay compliant without thinking about it; get it wrong and it costs them real money and trust. As a Staff Software Engineer on Tax Accounts, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: clean frontend code, reliable backend APIs and data models against a genuinely complex compliance domain, and the automation that keeps hundreds of thousands of accounts in sync with the agencies behind them. If you want technical craft with far-reaching impact in our modern economy helping power the livelihoods of millions of small business employees — join us.

Requirements

Significant software-development experience, typically 8+ years, with demonstrated staff-level technical leadership
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, and a strong sense of ownership over reliability, performance, and correctness
Comfort designing data models and APIs for a complex, rules-heavy domain (compliance, tax, payments, or similar) where edge cases and correctness matter
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new capabilities — plus curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, and a habit of sharing best practices to scale AI use safely across the team
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders

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 the systems behind employer and employee tax accounts: agency registrations, power-of-attorney / third-party authorizations, tax notices, agency filings, and state/federal/employee tax setup across jurisdictions
Build automation that requests and maintains access with tax agencies on the customer's behalf — the bots, data exchanges, and agency-event pipelines that keep accounts, rates, and deposit schedules accurate and prevent failed filings
Model complex, jurisdiction-specific compliance rules into maintainable systems, and own reliability, performance, and correctness in a domain where accuracy is non-negotiable
Partner closely with Product, Design, Tax Operations, and PEO teams to turn customer and compliance pain into solutions — then prototype, iterate, and launch
Mentor other engineers and help the team solve some of the hardest problems in a very complex domain, at large scale
Build products that our customers genuinely love