Sr. Staff Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

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 setupcalculation 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 domain 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 12+ 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 $191000/yr to $240000/yr in Denver & most remote locations and $225000/yr to $275000/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.