Staff AI Developer Tools Engineer — Equity & Impact

Gusto; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Engineer on the AI Developer Tools team to shape the AI platform that accelerates engineering across the company. You will architect a secure, context-aware, AI-native development lifecycle to reduce friction and speed delivery.

You will lead with a focus on autonomous agents, RAG, and tooling that self-heals CI/CD and scales across hundreds of engineers, while partnering with security and infrastructure to keep systems robust.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of systems engineering experience with large, complex codebases.
• Production AI experience with prompts, RAG, and multi-agent workflows.
• Developer-first mindset focused on UX for internal tools.
• Strong focus on data privacy, security, and reliability in AI deployments.

Responsibilities

• Architect AI Core Infrastructure: design, scale, and maintain internal platform and APIs that integrate LLMs into the developer workflow, focusing on autonomous agents, RAG, and smart context delivery.
• Drive Technical Leadership & Vision: establish engineering best practices for building with AI at Gusto, including evals, guardrails for code safety, and latency/token spend optimization.
• Collaborate & Evangelize: partner with product engineering to uncover friction points and work with Infrastructure and Security to ensure AI tooling is scalable, secure, and compliant.
• Optimize Feedback Loops: identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the local-to-production lifecycle at scale across Gusto.
• Maintain Enterprise Reliability: production-grade AI infrastructure with monitoring, issue diagnosis, and mitigation of model drift.

Skills

8+ Years of Systems Expertise

Production AI Experience

Developer-First Mindset

Strategic Execution

Exceptional Communication

Working as a Team

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Staff Engineer on the AI Developer Tools team to shape the AI platform that accelerates engineering across the company. You will architect a secure, context-aware, AI-native development lifecycle to reduce friction and speed delivery.

You will lead with a focus on autonomous agents, RAG, and tooling that self-heals CI/CD and scales across hundreds of engineers, while partnering with security and infrastructure to keep systems robust.