Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide.
Teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York.
About the role
As a Staff Engineer on the Developer Productivity - AI Developer Tools team, you will be the architectural anchor shaping the AI platform that accelerates engineering across Gusto.
You will redefine how the entire engineering organization builds, tests, and ships software by architecting a highly secure, context-aware, AI-native development lifecycle.
Responsibilities
Architect AI Core Infrastructure: design, scale, and maintain the internal platform and APIs that integrate LLMs into the developer workflow, with a focus on autonomous agents, custom RAG, and smart context-delivery systems.
Drive technical leadership and vision: establish engineering best practices for building with AI, including evaluation frameworks (evals), guardrails for code safety, and strategies for optimizing model latency and token spend.
Collaborate and evangelize with product engineering, Infrastructure, and Security teams.
Optimize feedback loops in the local-to-production lifecycle.
Maintain enterprise reliability: monitor system health, diagnose integration or networking issues, and mitigate model drift or downtime.
Requirements
8+ years of systems expertise navigating massive, complex codebases and delivering production-grade, distributed software.
Production AI experience: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG architectures, and orchestrating multi-agent workflows.
Developer-first mindset passionate about Developer Experience and Productivity.
Strategic execution: data privacy, security, cost management, and systemic reliability.
Exceptional communication and ability to work across team boundaries.
Conditions
Hybrid role; physical offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City; expected to work from the office approximately 2-3 days per week.
Cash compensation: $180,000/yr to $200,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations; $220,000/yr to $245,000/yr for San Francisco, New York & Seattle. Stock equity is additional.