Senior Software Engineer, Financial Data & Payments

Gusto; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is hiring seasoned engineers to join our Payments team, building the financial backbone of payroll, ledger, reconciliation, and reporting systems at scale. You’ll drive large technical decisions, shape end-to-end delivery, and maintain core experiences that power how employers fund payroll and how people get paid.

This role requires collaboration across engineering, product, design, data science, accounting, and compliance, mentoring fellow engineers and delivering robust, auditable, and

Qualifications

• Successful applicants have at least 10+ years of experience and the enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment.
• Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software as well as designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages.
• Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products.
• Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code that is maintainable, structured, and well-documented.
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems.
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs.
• Experience in one or more of these domains is strongly preferred: ledger or subledger design, financial reconciliation, accounting systems, or payments infrastructure.
• Comfort with double-entry accounting concepts — journal entries, chart of accounts, debits and credits, and tying a subledger out to the general ledger — and the ability to work with accountants and controllers in their own vocabulary.
• Experience building systems where correctness, auditability, and immutability matter more than raw throughput, and where a silent data error is worse than an outage.
• Bonus: Experience with bank account verification, payment rails (ACH, wire, RTP), or third-party banking data and verification providers.
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test the financial data systems that record every dollar Gusto moves — the ledger and subledger that serve as the system of record, the transaction models underneath them, and the financial reporting that Accounting, Finance, Compliance, and our partners rely on to close the books
• Build reconciliation at Gusto's scale: prove that our internal records agree with bank, processor, and partner statements, and make the breaks that fall out of that comparison traceable rather than mysterious
• Lead variance investigation end-to-end — the tooling, instrumentation, and runbooks that turn "the numbers don't tie" into a specific root cause, and then into a fix that eliminates the whole class of break
• Own the payment profile: how employers are set up to fund payroll and how employees and contractors are set up to be paid — the payment methods available and the rules that govern which apply to whom, the bank accounts and connections behind them, and the verification state that determines whether money can move at all
• Make setup and verification something a small business can finish on its own — instant bank verification, graceful handling of broken or revoked connections, and a clear path back to a payable state when something changes
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Accounting, Finance, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
• Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions

Skills

10+ years experience

Distributed systems

Lead multiple teams

Architecture for large-scale systems

Clarity in complex problems

Communicate technical complexity

Payments infrastructure knowledge

Ruby on Rails

Tools

Ruby on Rails

TypeScript

React

Job description

Gusto is hiring seasoned engineers to join our Payments team, building the financial backbone of payroll, ledger, reconciliation, and reporting systems at scale. You’ll drive large technical decisions, shape end-to-end delivery, and maintain core experiences that power how employers fund payroll and how people get paid.

This role requires collaboration across engineering, product, design, data science, accounting, and compliance, mentoring fellow engineers and delivering robust, auditable, and