Senior Staff Engineer - Tax Platform Engineering

United States Digital Space LLC; Denver (IL); Hybrid; USD 223,000 - 278,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Job summary

The company is hiring seasoned engineers to join teams that enhance core platform capabilities, focusing on payroll tax platforms. You will influence feature specs, extend existing systems, and build scalable solutions. The role emphasizes guiding projects end-to-end, collaboration with cross-functional partners, and delivering reliable software in a regulated domain.

Denver, SF, and NYC offices support hybrid schedules, with 2–3 days on-site. We offer competitive base pay, benefits, and equity.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing and developing robust, distributed systems.
• Experience guiding multiple teams on scaling and refactoring.
• Experience architecting and testing large-scale production code.
• Ability to simplify complex problems and communicate tradeoffs.
• Enthusiasm for collaborative, test-driven work.
• Mentor engineers and promote AI-enabled development.
• Familiar with AI tools (LLMs, Agents) and integrating them into workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test the platform for tax compliance at scale.
• Scale one of the world's largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React apps.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to solve complex problems.
• Improve developer productivity with robust internal tools and APIs.
• Drive technical strategy and long-term roadmap for your domain.
• Lead improvements to incident response and reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cross-team collaboration

Communication of technical complexity

Mentoring engineers

Test-driven development

AI tooling familiarity

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Typescript

React

Job description

About the company

At the company, 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.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build the company should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at the company. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

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 the company's Tax platform. As a the company Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

Payroll is the beating heart of the company’s business. The Tax team ensures the company 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. By combining reliable systems with thoughtful design, our team makes one of the most complicated parts of running a business simple for employers. Tax is a stabilizing pace layer at the company: continuity and trust are paramount, change is deliberate, and impact is wide. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, build, and testthe 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 the company 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.

the company 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, the company'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 the company 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 the company.

the company 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. the company considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. the company 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