Sr Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure
About the role
We're looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer to help evolve how Gusto stores and accesses data as the company scales.
This is a high-impact role shaping both the tools and the technology choices behind Gusto's storage layer.
Responsibilities
- Build the tooling and platform that let engineering teams provision and access new datastores, and evaluate and pilot highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems to meet Gusto's growing needs
- Take ownership of Kafka, from capacity planning and partitioning through performance tuning and reliability at scale, and help stand up and operate new non-relational datastores like DynamoDB
- Coordinate migrations and topology changes across the datastore platform (MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka) with minimal disruption to production
- Drive efficiency and reliability improvements across the platform through query and consumer optimization, caching strategies, and workload management, backed by strong automation and standards for data consistency, integrity, and security
- Participate in on-call and drive long-term, sustainable reductions in operational burden
- Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development, and share knowledge to grow the team's collective operating expertise
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems, with deep hands-on expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and/or non-relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar) in production at scale
- A strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes—and proven experience coordinating migrations or topology changes in production with minimal disruption
- Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, including caching systems like Redis/ValKey and streaming platforms like Kafka, with a track record of driving 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, using AI tooling to drive improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
Qualifications
- Bonus: Experience with self-hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (e.g., TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, or Citus), horizontal sharding, or service/vertical extraction from monolithic architectures
- Bonus: Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale
Skills
- Software engineering experience
- Experience with large-scale infrastructure systems
- Expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka)
- Experience with non-relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar)
- Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud
- Experience with caching systems and streaming platforms
- Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals
- Experience with coordination of migrations or topology changes in production
- Strong communication skills
- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment
Benefits
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).
The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger.
Pay
Cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $183,000-$200,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $222,000-$245,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York.
Schedule
Employees who are based in Gusto's physical office spaces will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).
The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.