Sr. Software Engineer, Group Engineering

Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Pay Group Engineering

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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, 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 – Building the best platform for businesses to hire, pay, and manage their entire workforce…
• Payroll – Core of Gusto’s business, ensuring employees are paid accurately, on time, and in compliance with complex regulations.
• Tax – Managing every aspect of payroll taxes including setup, calculation, payments, filings, and year‑end communications.
• Time – Building trusted, intuitive tools that make it easy for businesses to schedule, track, and manage their teams.

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 Type Script/React applications
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with 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
• Improve 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 OKRs
• Identify and prioritize long‑term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
• Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance reliability and effectiveness

Here’s What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of experience
• Experience 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
• 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 Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance preferred
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy
• Bonus:
  Experience with Ruby on Rails, Type Script, and React

Please note that travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding is required for this…