Senior Software Engineer, Workforce Payments

About the role

Who We Are

At Justworks, you will find a welcoming and casual environment. The company offers strong benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and opportunities to learn from leaders in the startup community. Team members are encouraged to work hard while caring for their colleagues, described as the most prized asset. The organization helps businesses launch and grow by enabling them to focus on their operations. Justworks solves HR issues using a data-driven approach that never stops iterating. The company seeks individuals who thrive in supportive, entrepreneurial settings, want to build something meaningful, and enjoy the process.

Who You Are

You are self-driven and prefer working with others to remove roadblocks. Curiosity drives you, and you love exploring and learning new technologies. You have a demonstrated ability to build, deploy, and maintain large-scale, complex applications. You care more about solutions and impacting the customer experience than using a specific tool or framework.

Your Success Profile

What You Will Work On

As a Senior Software Engineer for Workforce Payments, you will work with a team that builds the core computation layer powering Justworks' payroll, money movement, and tax calculation products. This role ensures customers can confidently and accurately pay their workforce. The team operates at the heart of the platform's financial accuracy and compliance. You will lead technical decision-making and take initiative in identifying projects that enable meeting key business goals. These goals include scaling tax and money movement capabilities, improving the integrity of the financial ledger, and developing robust platform interfaces for payroll data. The position requires a passion for solving real-world, complex financial problems. You will thrive while building a growing team focused on reliability and precision.

• Independently owning large-scoped projects from initial discovery through launch with a focus on outcomes and customer impact.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to find solutions for customer challenges.
• Improving the performance, reliability, and scalability of existing systems.
• Promoting engineering excellence through technical leadership, knowledge-sharing, and mentorship.
• Adding capabilities to high-volume, fault-tolerant processing infrastructure.
• Enhancing testing, monitoring, and continuous deployment infrastructure.
• Keeping extremely sensitive data compartmentalized and secure.

How You Will Do Your Work

Results are achieved through your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes. These competencies are critical for your success and the organization's success.

Good judgment involves the exercise of critical thinking. You will analyze and assess problems and implications, identify patterns, make connections of underlying issues, understand risks, develop mitigation strategies, and take ownership of the outcome.

Resourcefulness means taking a can-do approach. You will face obstacles and constraints by assessing what is present and effectively and efficiently optimizing available resources. This applies to working on new initiatives or thinking about how to improve existing processes.

Teamwork and communication require putting the collective best effort into documentation and collaboration.

Key Facts

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Location: USA

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Engagement: Full-time

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Compensation: $180,000 per year

What You'll Do

• Design scalable ingestion pipelines that handle high-volume payroll data with strict reliability.
• Architect core computation modules for tax calculation and money movement under tight compliance rules.
• Refactor legacy services to improve performance, reliability, and scalability across critical workflows.
• Champion engineering excellence through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and technical leadership on the team.
• Harden fault-tolerant processing infrastructure to protect extremely sensitive financial and employee data.
• Enhance testing and monitoring suites while improving continuous deployment for payroll platform interfaces.
• Establish secure data handling practices that keep confidential information properly compartmentalized at all times.
• Collaborate with product and compliance partners to define robust interfaces supporting payroll and HR workflows.

Requirements

• Demonstrate experience building, deploying, and maintaining large-scale, complex applications in production.
• Show proven ability to independently own projects from discovery through launch with a focus on customer outcomes.
• Bring 3-5 years of hands-on software development in workforce-related or financial systems.
• Exhibit strong judgment for assessing risks, identifying patterns, and developing mitigation strategies.
• Communicate clearly while documenting work and aligning with cross-functional teams to solve challenges.

Nice to Have

Experience with payroll, tax, or money movement platforms in prior roles.

Skills & Tools

Java, Python, SQL, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch.