Gusto · 7 hours ago
Staff Software Engineer - Payroll Platform
San Francisco Bay Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$163K/yr - $204K/yr
8+ years expGusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy by managing payroll, health insurance, and HR for small businesses. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Payroll Platform team, responsible for building backend product infrastructure and designing internal APIs to enhance payroll experiences. The role involves collaborating with various teams to ensure reliable and scalable payroll solutions.
Bookkeeping and PayrollEmployee BenefitsEnterprise SoftwareFinancial ServicesFinTechHuman ResourcesSaaSSoftware
Responsibilities
Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams
Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution
Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases
Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals
Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as we scale payroll processing for hundreds of thousands of businesses
Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions
Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and documentation, and help normalize and spread effective usage across the team
Qualification
Required
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support 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 experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems
Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage
Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization
Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages
Preferred
Experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
Benefits
Stock equity is additional.
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