Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Platform
Gusto · San Francisco, CA - Hybrid
About this role
**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 500,000 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). Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy: https://gusto.com/about/careers/total-rewards AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. --- **About the Role** We’re hiring a **Staff Software Engineer** to join Gusto’s **Payroll Platform** team. You’ll build backend product infrastructure that powers payroll experiences across Gusto. This is a fully backend role focused on designing and evolving internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll. You’ll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar for how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company. --- **About the Team** The Payroll Platform team builds foundational services that make payroll possible at Gusto. Customers include internal product teams building payroll, time, contractor, and accountant experiences, plus external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll. You’ll focus on reliable, performant, well-designed APIs that abstract away payroll complexity and enable teams to move faster with confidence—at the intersection of backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain. --- **Day-to-Day Responsibilities** - Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs supporting core payroll workflows used by multiple Gusto engineering teams - Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, responsible for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution - Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams—collaborate on needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design scalable solutions - Author and drive architecture/design documents, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals - Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as payroll processing scales to hundreds of thousands of businesses - Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant, customer-impacting solutions - Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and documentation, and spread effective usage across the team --- **What We’re Looking For** - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong backend focus - Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs supporting multiple product teams - Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems (from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration) - Strong system design skills, including performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production - Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (e.g., LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) and is comfortable helping teams adopt respo
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