Senior Staff Engineer
Job description
Senior Staff Engineer at Gusto, Inc.
About the role
Gusto is seeking experienced engineers to enhance its core platform capabilities, focusing on extensibility and scalability. This role involves guiding projects from initial specification through execution and maintenance, particularly within the Tax platform. You will build software that impacts the modern economy.
Key facts
Team: Tax
The Tax team is central to Gusto's business, ensuring compliance and accuracy for payroll taxes. This includes setup, calculations, payments, filings, and year-end communications. The team designs user-friendly experiences and builds reliable infrastructure for complex tax processes.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and test the platform supporting tax compliance for many users.
- Contribute to scaling one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications.
- Collaborate on complex problems with various teams including Product, Design, and Data Science.
- Improve team productivity and satisfaction through new services, tools, and APIs.
- Implement safeguards within the Tax platform to enable safe use of AI for tax concepts, ensuring compliance and stability.
- Work in a supportive environment to drive innovation and productivity.
- Define and lead the technical strategy and roadmap for your domain, aligning with company goals.
- Identify and prioritize long-term investments for foundational systems and architecture.
- Lead improvements in incident response processes, tools, and culture for better system reliability.
- Mentor and develop engineers, enhancing team capabilities through code review and knowledge sharing.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of experience.
- Experience designing and developing distributed systems using multiple programming languages.
- Experience influencing and guiding multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing existing products.
- Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production code.
- Ability to bring clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems.
- Skill in communicating technical complexity and facilitating informed tradeoffs.
- Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven development environment.
- Ability to build maintainable, structured, and well-documented code.
- Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software.
- Experience building products in highly regulated and high-risk domains.
- Familiarity with current AI tools (LLMs, Agents) including their benefits and limitations.
- Practice embedding AI in daily development workflows to reduce cycle time.
- Mentoring engineers on effective AI usage and developing AI strategy for others.
Nice to have
- Experience in Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance domains.
- Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React.
Skills & tools
- Ruby/Rails
- TypeScript/React
- AI tools (LLMs, Agents)
Practical notes
Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City are expected to work from the office 2-3 days per week, or more depending on the role. A secure and reliable internet connection is required for remote work days.