Principal Software Engineer - Group Engineering

Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

Denver, CO;
San Francisco, CA;
New York, NY

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.

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.

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.

Day‑to‑Day Responsibilities

• 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 Type Script/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

Qualifications

• At least 15+ years of experience

• Ability 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

•…