Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 400,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy .

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Payroll and Tax systems. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. Pay Group (payroll and tax) teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of the customers. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers, both internal and external.

Sub- Teams:

• Tax Accuracy: The Tax Accuracy group is responsible for gathering and maintaining the necessary information for us to pay and file taxes accurately and on time for our customers, and consists of multiple teams that cover various parts of the process.
• Ledger: This team is building a payroll ledger to track accrual accounting for payroll-related money movement. This team is starting to support the payroll domain, risk, payments, and accounting.
• Engine: This team works closely with the payroll compliance team to ensure enablement of compliant pay, such as minimum wage adjustments, regular rate of pay, etc. We enable end-to-end success of payroll processing and working with various domain teams such as tax calculations, tax setup, payments, and more.
• Platform: This team is developing a new platform to be the common interface for interacting with payroll and tax data. The payroll and tax domain is highly complex; our team exists to make it easier for other application teams to interact with the payroll and tax system. We enable application and experience teams to deliver customer value faster by providing a scalable, flexible, performant, and highly understandable platform to integrate with.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Payroll Services, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals
• Design, build, and test the foundation that supports compliant payroll for millions of people
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
• Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions
• Drive the product development process from concept to launch, delivering delightful products that make payroll, taxes, and compliance simple and easy
• Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build.
• Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
• Continuously stay up-to-date with advancements in AI and Machine Learning , applying this knowledge to our projects.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• Successful applicants typically have at least 15+ years of experience
• Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
• Strong knowledge of data structures, data modeling, and system design
• Experience working across 3+ teams, influencing both product and team direction
• Experience working on platform products which are depended upon throughout the company
• Experience engineering, designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production
• An aptitude in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex problems, communicating technical complexity and facilitating informed tradeoffs to major stakeholders
• Experience operationalizing and scaling large interconnected production systems
• Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
• Experience in complex highly regulated domains
• Examples: HR, Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
• Experience using AI tools to build, test, and iterate on products quickly.
• Understanding of how to evaluate AI-driven outputs using clear success criteria.
• A commitment to staying current on emerging backend technologies and AI frameworks and patterns, regularly experimenting with new approaches.
• Willingness to contribute to shared tools or templates that enhance the speed and safety of AI experimentation.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $215,000/yr to $252,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $251,000/yr to $295,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice .