Gusto · 10 hours ago
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll , Developer Experience
Greater Seattle Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$200K/yr - $230K/yr
12+ years expGusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, providing essential services like payroll and HR to over 400,000 small businesses. The Senior Staff Software Engineer will lead technical initiatives on the Embedded Payroll team, focusing on enhancing developer experience and improving platform tools and APIs.
Bookkeeping and PayrollEmployee BenefitsEnterprise SoftwareFinancial ServicesFinTechHuman ResourcesSaaSSoftware
Responsibilities
Identify high-leverage opportunities to improve developer experience across our APIs, tooling, documentation, and workflows
Partner closely with internal product, solution architect, and engineering teams to define a vision for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll
Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and influence platform direction
Design and evolve APIs, abstractions, and interfaces with a focus on clarity, consistency, and long-term maintainability
Build and maintain developer-facing tools, libraries, and internal frameworks that improve velocity and reliability
Lead by example through hands-on development, shipping clean, tested, and well-designed code
Set and promote best practices for reliability, observability, and backwards compatibility in developer-facing systems
Qualification
Required
12+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated ownership of organization-wide engineering initiatives and contributions to scaling engineering organizations
Deep backend engineering expertise, including experience operating large, production-grade systems, with comfort working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic technical tradeoffs
Proven experience designing APIs, platforms, or developer tools with developers as the primary customer, with strong attention to usability, documentation, error handling, and end-to-end developer experience
Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise the technical bar across teams, and provide guidance on ambiguous problems and competing priorities
Strong business acumen, with the ability to align technical direction to business priorities and clearly communicate constraints, tradeoffs, and needs to non-technical stakeholders
Curiosity and effectiveness in leveraging intelligence, automation, and experimentation to design, ship, and operate reliable, partner-facing payroll APIs 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
Small Business Trends
2026-01-12
General Catalyst
2025-12-30
Digital Commerce 360
2025-12-20
Company data provided by crunchbase