Senior Staff Engineer - Tax Platform Engineering

Gusto; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 223,000 - 278,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Job summary

Gusto is hiring seasoned engineers to advance the Tax platform, scaling large distributed systems and guiding cross‑functional teams from design to deployment. You’ll contribute to core platform capabilities that handle payroll taxes and compliance for millions of users, while mentoring peers and driving architectural improvements.

The role emphasizes collaboration with Engineering, PM, Design, Data Science, and Compliance, with a focus on reliability and scalable software that enables

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing robust, distributed systems
• Ability to guide work across multiple teams on scaling and refactoring
• Experience architecting and testing large-scale production code
• Strong communication to explain technical tradeoffs and decisions
• Familiarity with AI tools and embedding AI into development workflows

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test platform components for tax compliance
• Scale Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, and React applications
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across Engineering, PM, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations
• Improve developer productivity with robust services, tools, and APIs
• Integrate guardrails for compliant use of AI in tax concepts; ensure reliability

Skills

10+ years

Distributed systems

Cross-team collaboration

Communication of complexity

AI tools

Mentoring engineers

Job description

About Gusto

At Gusto, we’re on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

About The Role

We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Tax platform. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll guide projects end‑to‑end by influencing feature specs, moving existing systems toward desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining core code that powers critical experiences.

About The Team

Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. The Tax team ensures customers remain compliant and confident by managing every aspect of payroll taxes—including setup, calculation, payments, filings, and year‑end communications. We design seamless, end‑to‑end experiences that simplify complex processes and build the infrastructure that keeps taxes accurate and on time.

Here’s What You’ll Do Day‑to‑day

• Design, build, and test the platform that supports tax compliance for millions of people
• 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, Compliance, Operations, and other cross‑functional teams
• Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build
• Build guardrails into the Tax platform that enable Gusto to safely leverage agentic AI to interact with tax concepts in a way that ensures compliance, accuracy, stability, and reliability
• Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
• Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your team’s domain area in alignment with team and group‑level OKRs
• Identify and prioritize long‑term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
• Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness
• Mentor and develop engineers on your team working to create holistic and scalable solutions. Track record of elevating team capabilities through pairing, code review, and knowledge sharing

Here’s What We’re Looking For

• Successful applicants have at least 10+ years of experience
• Experience in 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
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
• Enthusiasm for a highly collaborative, test‑driven environment
• Able to build maintainable, structured, well‑documented code
• Experience building fault‑tolerant, mission‑critical software
• Experience building products in highly regulated and high‑risk domains
• Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
• Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs, Agents) and their shortcomings/benefits
• Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests, summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $223,000/yr to $278,000/yr for San Francisco. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2–3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non‑office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.