Staff Software Engineer, Expansion Experiences

Gusto•San Francisco, CA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is hiring a seasoned full-stack software engineer for its Expansion Experiences team. The team helps small business owners discover and adopt more Gusto offerings, including plan upgrades, 401(k), health insurance, and features suited to their business. The Staff Software Engineer will work across the product lifecycle, from shaping early concepts through launch and ongoing iteration, combining frontend development, backend API design, and product and customer-experience judgment. The role focuses on creating customer-facing experiences and improving customer behavior through structured experiments and data-informed iteration. The engineer will build reliable APIs and data models for personalization and customer journeys, contribute to technical and product quality across the team, and collaborate with Product Management, Design, Data, and Platform Engineering. Gusto expects team members to actively use relevant AI tools and develop their AI fluency. Gusto has offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees based near those offices are expected to work onsite on designated days approximately two to three days per week, or more depending on the role. Travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required. Approved work from outside a Gusto office requires a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection. The role's targeted cash compensation is $164,000–$204,000 in Denver and most remote locations, and $199,000–$247,000 in San Francisco and New York; stock equity is additional. Final offers depend on factors including experience and expertise.

Requirements

Typically 8 or more years of software development experience.
Product-minded approach that starts with the customer problem and relevant metric, and willingness to propose a different approach when data supports it.
Experience building scalable solutions that address customer pain, ideally in growth, lifecycle, or conversion-focused contexts such as onboarding, upsell flows, personalization, or recommendations; alternatively, demonstrated ability to think this way.
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and achieve measurable customer impact at scale.
Comfort designing and interpreting experiments and working with ambiguous or evolving requirements.
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
Experience with large-scale refactors and performance and reliability issues, and ownership of all aspects of a product area.
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver product capabilities.
Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, and well-documented code.
Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.
Travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required.
When approved to work outside a Gusto office, ability to maintain a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection.

Nice To Haves

Experience in, or interest in working with, Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, and TypeScript.
Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and test customer-facing experiences across recommendations, nurture campaigns, booking flows, and plan upgrade and retention experiences.
Run structured experiments, including A/B tests and phased rollouts, to assess effects on conversion, adoption, or retention, and iterate based on results.
Design and build reliable backend APIs and data models supporting personalization, recommendations, and multi-step customer journeys.
Mentor engineers and raise standards for technical execution, product quality, and responsible use of AI across the team.
Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Data, and Platform Engineering to understand customer pain points, develop solutions, prototype, iterate, and launch.
Contribute across the full product lifecycle, from early concepts through launch and long-term iteration.