Staff Software Engineer

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

• Own meaningful slices of the signup-to-activation experience end to end — from data model to UI — and ship measurable improvements to how quickly and reliably new customers get up and running.
• Invent and prototype net-new, 0-to-1 experiences — bringing your own ideas for how AI can reimagine onboarding, not just implementing a spec handed to you.
• Partner directly with Product, Design, and Data to frame problems, form hypotheses, and validate them with real customers in weeks, not quarters.
• Identify where AI meaningfully removes customer effort (and where a simple form is better), and build those experiences thoughtfully into the flow.
• Design onboarding as modular, reusable building blocks so new entry points into Gusto can be added quickly without rebuilding the foundation.
• Raise the engineering bar through pragmatic technical direction, high-quality code, strong reviews, and mentoring engineers around you.
• Make sharp scoping calls under a time box — shipping the simplest version that proves or disproves an idea, then iterating.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping customer-facing products at scale.
• A product-minded engineer who starts from the customer problem and the metric that matters, not just the ticket — and who can operate independently across product, design, and data partners.
• Demonstrated ability to move fast and execute with high quality: someone who ships, measures, and iterates rather than waiting for perfect certainty.
• Experience applying AI/LLM capabilities to real product problems — with the judgment to know where it adds value and where it adds noise — and a habit of using AI tools to work more effectively.
• A founder mindset: high ownership, comfort with ambiguity and greenfield problems, and a bias toward action and outcomes over output.
• A track record of raising the bar for teams around you — through technical leadership, mentorship, and setting standards others follow.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals and the versatility to work wherever the problem is (front end, back end, data).

• Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $223,000/yr to $278,000/yr for San Francisco. Stock equity is additional.
• 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).
• When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.