Staff Software Engineer, Expansion Experiences

Gusto, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

11h•$199,000 - $247,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is seeking a seasoned full-stack software engineer for its Expansion Experiences team. The team helps small business owners discover and adopt Gusto offerings, including higher-tier plans, 401(k), health insurance, and features suited to their business. The Staff Software Engineer works across the full product lifecycle, shaping experiments and features from concept through launch and ongoing iteration. The role combines frontend development, reliable backend API design, and product and customer-experience judgment, with an emphasis on whether work changes customer behavior.

Requirements

Typically 8 or more years of software development experience.
Product-minded approach focused on customer problems and meaningful metrics, with comfort proposing a different approach when data supports it.
Experience building scalable solutions that reduce customer pain, ideally in growth, lifecycle, or conversion-focused contexts such as onboarding, upsell flows, personalization, or recommendations, or demonstrated ability to think this way.
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and deliver 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, 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 new product capabilities.
Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code.
Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.
Willingness to travel to a Gusto office for onboarding.
For approved work from a non-office location, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.

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 for recommendations, nurture campaigns, booking flows, and plan upgrades and retention.
Run structured experiments, including A/B tests and phased rollouts, to evaluate effects on conversion, adoption, or retention, and iterate based on results.
Design and build reliable backend APIs and data models for personalization, recommendations, and multi-step customer journeys.
Mentor engineers and raise the bar for technical execution, product quality, and responsible AI use across the team.
Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Data, and Platform Engineering to understand customer pain points, develop solutions, and prototype, iterate, and launch them.