Gusto · 3 days ago
Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure
New York, NY
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$200K/yr - $230K/yr
12+ years expGusto is a company focused on supporting small businesses by handling essential services like payroll and HR. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to manage and innovate their distributed database systems, ensuring high performance and operational excellence as they scale. The role involves architecting systems, coordinating migrations, and mentoring team members to enhance their infrastructure capabilities.
Bookkeeping and PayrollEmployee BenefitsEnterprise SoftwareFinancial ServicesFinTechHuman ResourcesSaaSSoftware
Responsibilities
Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence
Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services
Define and drive efficiency improvements across the storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management
Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems
Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions
Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development
Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems, actively developing our collective operational expertise
Qualification
Required
12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems
Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (strongly preferred: TiDB; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)
Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management
Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale
5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale
Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations, driving improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
Preferred
Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures
Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale
Benefits
Health insurance
401(k)s
Company
Gusto
Gusto is an HR and payroll platform that simplifies complex tasks, empowering businesses to focus on what matters most.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Gusto has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (49)
2024 (54)
2023 (19)
2022 (37)
2021 (24)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$746.1MKey Investors
Friends & Family CapitalT. Rowe PriceAkkadian Ventures
2023-01-28Series Unknown
2022-05-12Series E· $55M
2021-08-10Series E· $175M
Leadership Team
Josh Reeves
Head of Gusto (CEO) and Co-Founder. Building Gusto for the Long Term.
Edward Kim
Co-founder and Head of Technology
Recent News
General Catalyst
2025-12-30
Digital Commerce 360
2025-12-20
2025-12-19
Company data provided by crunchbase