Staff Software Engineer (Payroll Platform)

Join Gusto as a Staff Software Engineer on the Payroll Platform team. In this fully backend role, you will design and evolve internal APIs and services that power payroll experiences across Gusto. You will own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar on how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company. You will also collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams.
• Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution.
• Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases.

Requirements

• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
• Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration
• Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support multiple product teams
• Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage
• Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization
• Strong system design skills, including experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems

Pay

USD 163,000 - 247,000