Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Payroll Platform & APIs

The Briefed; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grants

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Flexible hybrid/remote arrangements

Generous PTO

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Platform team. You will design and evolve internal APIs and services powering payroll workflows across the company, partnering with multiple engineering teams to deliver compliant and scalable payroll capabilities.

You will own a domain within Payroll Platform, ensuring system health, performance, and long-term evolution, while applying AI-assisted development tools to improve code quality and documentation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with backend focus.
• Proven track record building and scaling internal platforms and APIs.
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous problems from requirement analysis to delivery.

Responsibilities

• Backend Architecture & APIs: Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs used across teams.
• Domain Ownership: Own a primary domain within Payroll Platform, ensuring health and scalability.
• Technical Partnership: Collaborate with internal teams to guide platform adoption and co-design solutions.
• System Design & Documentation: Create architecture/design docs and set technical direction.
• Scalability & Performance: Improve performance and observability as payroll scales for many businesses.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Ops.
• AI Tool Integration: Leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate development and improve docs.

Skills

Backend development

System design

Ruby

AI tools in development

Collaboration

Tools

LLMs

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Payroll Platform team. You will design and evolve internal APIs and services powering payroll workflows across the company, partnering with multiple engineering teams to deliver compliant and scalable payroll capabilities.

You will own a domain within Payroll Platform, ensuring system health, performance, and long-term evolution, while applying AI-assisted development tools to improve code quality and documentation.