Software Engineering Manager Payments

Joinhorizon; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Money Movement team. You will empower engineers, grow the team, and own the end‑to‑end money movement across multiple rails, ensuring reliability and cost effectiveness.

You’ll collaborate with Product, Design, Data, Operations, Accounting, and Treasury to de‑risk payments and expand capabilities. The role requires 8+ years of software experience and 3+ years of leadership, with a focus on payments infrastructure, cloud platforms, and scalable

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands‑on software development experience.
• 3+ years in engineering management or equivalent leadership role.
• Experience leading a Payments platform team and scaling rails.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Money Movement team to expand payment rails across US and internationally.
• Drive technical guidance and execution for next‑gen payment rails and money movement capabilities.
• Own end‑to‑end money movement across rails with on‑call ownership and SLOs.

Skills

Engineering management

Payments platform

Kafka

DynamoDB

Redis

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Code review

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Kafka

DynamoDB

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Redis

Kubernetes

Ruby on Rails

Job description

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.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto 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 Gusto. 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 Team:

Money Movement (MM) is a core Payments Engineering team responsible for actually moving money at Gusto — reliably, on time, and at scale. The team owns Gusto’s payment rails and the integrations behind them: ACH, wires, real‑time payments, checks, and international and stablecoin rails through partners. MM owns the connections to partner banks and payment providers, the APIs that initiate credits and debits, the ingestion of incoming bank data, and the routing logic that selects the most efficient rail for each payment based on speed, cost, geography, currency, and regulatory requirements. The team also builds the operational tooling that Payment Operations depends on to stop, reverse, verify, and investigate payments.

MM sits within the Payments org alongside the Financial Data and Payment Profile team. Where that team owns the source of truth for payment data and the customer‑facing payment method experience, MM owns execution — the systems that hand money to a bank or partner and track it to settlement. The team operates tier‑1 systems with clear reliability ownership, on‑call responsibility, and defined SLOs measured across every rail, and is in the middle of extracting money movement out of the monolith into a standalone Payments Service with a rails‑factory architecture and stable API contracts for upstream product teams.

As an Engineering Manager on the Money Movement team, you’ll directly empower a team of engineers, supporting them in their continued growth and success. You’ll collaborate with a talented cross‑functional team of Product, Design, and Data partners, along with Payment Operations, Accounting, and Treasury, focusing on payments infrastructure that customers can trust with their payroll.

Here’s what you’ll do day‑to‑day:

• Develop the engineering team across the Money Movement domain to help build the long term vision of the payments team at Gusto. The leader will expand Gusto’s payment rails across the US and internationally while ensuring that our 500K+ businesses and millions of their employees are getting paid on time, every time.
• Lead, empower and coach a team across engineering for payments to i) drive technical guidance and consistent execution of the next generation of payment rails and money movement capabilities that enable Gusto to expand its product offerings; ii) recruit, hire, and onboard new engineering team members; iii) identify and address any roadblocks or challenges faced by the team; and iv) deliver scaled engineering solutions on time.
• Own reliable, efficient, compliant and cost effective end‑to‑end money movement across every rail — including on‑call ownership, SLOs, and error budgets for tier‑1 payment systems — and work cross‑functionally with Payment Operations, Accounting and Treasury to de‑risk any payments related issues with bank and provider partners.
• Drive the modularization of payments: lead the extraction of money movement into a standalone service with clean API contracts, so new rails can be added once at the platform layer instead of being re‑integrated by every product team.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence within the team. In addition, collaborate and communicate with senior management and stakeholders to develop and execute long‑term strategies for Gusto’s engineering department
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with cross‑functional teams, including product, design, data science, and the upstream product teams that depend on payments, to make tradeoffs that build customer trust

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• 8+ years of relevant hands‑on programming experience
• 3+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience managing a Payments platform team
• Comfortable guiding the team strategically as well as contributing hands on where it’s needed to support the team. Expect to be reviewing code, and coding where it’s needed to move the team along.
• Experience with growing and managing talent with varied experience level
• Comfortable navigating a complex and ambiguous problem space, and asking for help and clarification when needed
• Willingness to debate and commit
• Experience in shipping a cross‑functional projects and driving business growth
• A desire to grow and learn on the job
• Completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline; higher education preferred
• Stays informed about AI capabilities relevant to engineering teams and thoughtfully incorporates them into workflows, tooling, and decision‑making.

highly available, horizontally scalable systems, and continuing to reduce blast radius and improve the resilience of the databases we already operate.

Here’s what you’ll do day‑to‑day:

• Build the tooling and platform that let engineering teams provision and access new datastores, and evaluate and pilot highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems to meet Gusto’s growing needs
• Take ownership of Kafka, from capacity planning and partitioning through performance tuning and reliability at scale, and help stand up and operate new non‑relational datastores like DynamoDB
• Coordinate migrations and topology changes across the datastore platform (MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka) with minimal disruption to production
• Drive efficiency and reliability improvements across the platform through query and consumer optimization, caching strategies, and workload management, backed by strong automation and standards for data consistency, integrity, and security
• Participate in on‑call and drive long‑term, sustainable reductions in operational burden
• Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development, and share knowledge to grow the team’s collective operating expertise

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large‑scale infrastructure systems, with deep hands‑on expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and/or non‑relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar) in production at scale
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes—and proven experience coordinating migrations or topology changes in production with minimal disruption
• Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, including caching systems like Redis/ValKey and streaming platforms like Kafka, with a track record of driving infrastructure optimization at scale
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI‑native environment, using AI tooling to drive improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
• Bonus: Experience with self‑hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (e.g., TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, or Citus), horizontal sharding, or service/vertical extraction from monolithic architectures
• Bonus: Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $183,000-$200,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $222,000-$245,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. 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.