Staff AI Platform Engineer: Build Scalable AI Core

The Wrap; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 247,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the teams behind our AI product platforms, supporting small businesses with payroll, HR, and benefits tools. You will own the core engine for AI-driven features, build reliable backend services, and set engineering standards across teams.

The role emphasizes hands-on AI production, scalable design, and mentoring engineers, with hybrid office presence in New York, Denver, and San Francisco.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Hands-on experience bringing AI/LLM capabilities to production — orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, and evaluation loops.
• AI fluency: daily use of AI coding assistants across the development lifecycle, writing, reviewing, debugging, and documenting code.
• Strong judgment on when to apply AI tools and how to evaluate output quality.
• Passion for building scalable, efficient platforms for users.
• Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain evaluation frameworks across offline and online environments, including golden datasets and pipelines, with regression gates and observability for agent runs.
• Design, build, and test core platform services — communications, reporting, dashboards, access, workflows, risk, payments, and compliance.
• Mentor other engineers to solve complex problems at scale.
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and JavaScript/React applications in the world.
• Collaborate with Product Engineering, Product Management, Data, and Design to understand customer pain points and prototype, iterate, and launch daily.
• Build platforms trusted by engineering teams to deliver products customers love.

Skills

AI/LLM production

Ruby on Rails

JavaScript/React

System design

Tools

Ruby on Rails

JavaScript/React

AI/LLM tooling

Observability & tracing

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the teams behind our AI product platforms, supporting small businesses with payroll, HR, and benefits tools. You will own the core engine for AI-driven features, build reliable backend services, and set engineering standards across teams.

The role emphasizes hands-on AI production, scalable design, and mentoring engineers, with hybrid office presence in New York, Denver, and San Francisco.