Senior Backend Security & AI Platform Engineer

The Wrap; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 181,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base pay

Benefits

Equity (RSUs)

Job summary

Gusto is hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer on the Product & AI Security Engineering team. You will own security foundations behind Gusto’s products and AI/LLM experiences—from authentication to secure data handling—defining architecture and standards across products and guardrails for teams.

You will design and operate authentication/authorization, protect core services and data, and lead threat modeling and mitigations for AI/LLM security while partnering with product, platform, and AI

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience as a backend engineer building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs.
• Proven track record building secure, highly available distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with modern security tooling and practices (SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA).
• Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience with AI tools for coding (e.g., Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot).
• Strong collaboration skills and the ability to break down complex security and AI problems into practical solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate authentication and authorization systems that work at Gusto scale.
• Strengthen core services and data protections, including access control, storage, and APIs.
• Detect and mitigate account takeover and other abuse, improving safety for customers.
• Build security platforms and tooling that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely.
• Own and improve high-availability security and identity services that other teams depend on.
• Tackle ambiguous AI/LLM security problems from threat modeling to practical mitigations.
• Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Security tooling

API design

AI coding tools

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

GraphQL

gRPC

Kubernetes

Terraform

Traefik

Flask

Okta

Job description

Gusto is hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer on the Product & AI Security Engineering team. You will own security foundations behind Gusto’s products and AI/LLM experiences—from authentication to secure data handling—defining architecture and standards across products and guardrails for teams.

You will design and operate authentication/authorization, protect core services and data, and lead threat modeling and mitigations for AI/LLM security while partnering with product, platform, and AI