Staff Software Engineer, Pricing and Packaging Engineering

Gusto•San Francisco, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Pricing & Packaging team is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to drive the development of Gusto’s internal Commerce Platform solutions. You’ll own the architecture and delivery of systems that power how Gusto packages, prices, and delivers its products to over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. In this role, you’ll partner closely with product, data science, and cross-functional engineering teams to build a reliable, scalable platform infrastructure that enables Gusto’s growth. If you’re energized by high-stakes platform work at the intersection of engineering excellence and real business impact, this role is for you. The Pricing & Packaging team sits at the heart of Gusto’s Commerce infrastructure, serving as the single source of truth for all products, bundles, add-ons, subscriptions, pricing, promotions, and discounts across Gusto’s first-party customer experience. The team owns and operates Gusto’s internal Commerce Platform, including the product catalog, promotion engine, subscription, pricing experimentation platform, and entitlement services that enable Growth and other teams to bring Gusto’s offerings to market effectively. We’re a collaborative team of engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists working on quarterly goals and monthly milestones, with a strong emphasis on platform reliability, adoption, and business impact. Our work directly shapes how Gusto’s 500,000+ small business customers access the payroll, benefits, and HR tools they rely on every day.

Requirements

Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience.
Deep experience building and operating large-scale backend platform systems, ideally in commerce, billing, subscription management, pricing, and packaging domains.
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and service reliability practices, with experience defining and meeting SLOs in production environments.
Ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives, influence without authority, and align engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
Experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your product area.

Nice To Haves

AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

Responsibilities

Lead technical design and architecture for parts of the Commerce Platform, including the product catalog, promotion engine, and subscription and entitlement systems, ensuring services are reliable, performant, and meet business needs.
Partner with product management and cross-functional engineering teams (Growth, Onboarding, product teams) to define the platform’s technical roadmap and drive adoption across Gusto.
Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous projects from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration.
Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical coaching, fostering a culture of craftsmanship and continuous improvement.
Leverage AI tools to accelerate engineering velocity and establish team-wide best practices for AI-augmented development.
Collaborate with Gusto’s marketing and business teams to evolve the self-serve system for managing products, bundles, promotions, and discounts, enabling faster time-to-market for new offerings.