Staff Software Engineer, Growth (Orchestration Platform)

About the role

Gusto is a company dedicated to supporting small businesses. We handle critical tasks such as payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR, allowing business owners to focus on their core competencies. Our company is headquartered in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, serving over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. Full-time employees receive competitive compensation, benefits, and equity.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test full-stack platform capabilities that power signal-driven workflows and customer engagement experiences across the funnel
• Build systems that ingest, prioritize, and route product, marketing, and sales signals into actionable next-best steps for downstream teams and tools
• Create backend services and internal interfaces that support orchestration, decisioning, experimentation, and delivery across evolving engagement channels
• Scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and JavaScript/React applications in the world, focusing on performance, maintainability, and reliability
• Collaborate with Product Management, Data, Design, Platform Engineering, and go-to-market partners to understand pain points, prototype solutions, and launch iteratively
• Mentor other engineers to help solve complex technical problems across distributed systems, product workflows, and platform architecture
• Build products and platforms that internal teams love to use and that create measurable customer and business impact

Requirements

Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience, experience building scalable full-stack systems, and experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and drive measurable impact at scale. They should also have experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of a product or platform area. Strong product and platform instincts, with the ability to balance technical quality, speed, and long-term maintainability, are essential. Applicants should have experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and unlock new product capabilities. Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, and sound judgment about how to evaluate and scale AI use safely and effectively, are also important.

Qualifications

• Experience with Ruby on Rails
• Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
• Effective communication skills, able to build relationships with engineering teams and business stakeholders

Skills

Experience with large-scale systems, strong problem-solving skills, and the ability to work independently and as part of a team are crucial. A strong understanding of AI tools and systems, and the ability to leverage them to accelerate development and improve testing, is also important.

Benefits

At Gusto, we offer competitive compensation, benefits, and stock equity. The cash compensation range for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional, and final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Pay

The cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Schedule

This role requires travel to Gusto's office for onboarding. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter. Employees who are based in Gusto's Denver, San Francisco, or New York City offices will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.