Sr. Staff 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—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy .

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 system. 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. The Pay Group teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes & 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

• Contractors + EOR: The Contractors + EOR team is building the best platform for businesses to hire, pay, and manage their entire workforce—whether they’re contractors, employees, or international teammates. We make contractor payments fast, reliable, and compliant, while simplifying workflows for employers with powerful tools like automated payments, reimbursements, and bulk onboarding. Beyond payments, we’re creating seamless experiences for international employees through payroll, onboarding, and compliance solutions that scale across borders. Together, our mission is to position Gusto as the go-to platform for small and mid-sized businesses to confidently support every member of their team, no matter where they work.
• Payroll: Payroll is the core of Gusto’s business, ensuring employees are paid accurately, on time, and in compliance with complex regulations. Our teams design and maintain the infrastructure and customer experiences that make payroll simple and reliable. From setup through submission, we build intuitive systems that help business owners run payroll with confidence.
• Tax: The Tax team ensures Gusto customers remain compliant and confident by managing every aspect of payroll taxes—including setup,calculation, payments, filings, and year-end communications. We design seamless, end-to-end experiences that simplify complex processes and build the infrastructure that keeps taxes accurate and on time. By combining reliable systems with thoughtful design, our team makes one of the most complicated parts of running a business simple for employers.
• Time: The Time team builds trusted, intuitive tools that make it easy for businesses to schedule, track, and manage their teams. From scheduling shifts and managing availability to tracking hours and time off, we deliver smart, compliant solutions that reduce complexity for employers while empowering employees. By embedding automation and mobile-first workflows, we transform how time is managed—so teams can focus on what matters most.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• 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
• Build the software platform that powers multiple 1st and 3rd party products and serves millions of businesses.
• 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
• Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your team's domain area in alignment with team and group-level OKRs
• Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
• Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness

Here’s what we're looking for:

• Successful applicants have at least 8+ years of experience
• Experience in designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
• Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
• Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
• Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
• Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
• Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software
• Experience building products in highly regulated domains is desired, but not required
• Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
• Experience creating prompt libraries for common patterns
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage.
• Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs, Cursor, Copilot, Agents) and their shortcomings / benefits
• Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests, summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time.
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React

Please note that travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $191,000/yr to $240,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $225,000/yr to $275,000/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.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer .

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