Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Platform

Gusto, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

9d•$163,000 - $247,000

About The Position

Gusto is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Payroll Platform team. This fully backend role builds and evolves internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll experiences. The engineer will own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner with engineering teams, and help improve how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company. The Payroll Platform team provides foundational services for Gusto’s payroll products and for external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll. It builds reliable, performant, well-designed APIs that abstract payroll complexity and help teams move faster. The work spans backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain. The role requires travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding. Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York are expected to work from the office on designated days approximately two to three days per week, or more depending on the role. Work from an approved non-office location requires secure, reliable, consistent internet access, and regular, predictable attendance is expected. Compensation is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 per year in Denver and most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 per year in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York; stock equity is additional. Gusto states that full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Requirements

At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development.
Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs used by multiple product teams.
Ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding business needs through delivery and iteration.
Strong system design skills, including performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems.
Active daily use of AI-assisted development tools and comfort helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage.
Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization.
Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages.
Travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding is required.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs supporting core payroll workflows and used by multiple Gusto engineering teams.
Own a primary Payroll Platform domain, including its system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution.
Partner with other engineering teams to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design scalable solutions.
Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery and long-term platform goals.
Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as payroll processing scales.
Collaborate with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant, customer-impacting solutions.
Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and documentation, and help normalize effective usage across the team.