Staff Backend Engineer, Financial Infrastructure

Gusto; Burlingame (CA); Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 247,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (RSUs)

Competitive base pay

Job summary

Gusto is seeking an experienced engineer to own backend services and APIs that move money and assets for Gusto Retirement. You will ship production code, handle complex financial edge cases, and collaborate with product, compliance, and operations to deliver reliable software.

You will join the Financial Infrastructure team handling payments, settlements, tax, and integrations, working with cross-functional partners to deliver scalable, production-ready solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms.
• Strong experience with services, APIs, and data-heavy workflows.
• Experience working on financial systems, payments, or other high-correctness domains.
• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including production support and operational work.
• Experience working closely with PMs and cross-functional partners to deliver scoped work.
• Pragmatic, execution-focused approach to engineering.
• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize performance and impact.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails (or a comparable backend framework).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship services and APIs for money movement and financial integrations.
• Work on payments, settlements, reconciliation, and corrections involving real customer funds.
• Build and support critical workflows like payroll integration, KYB/KYC, 401k loans, billing and invoicing, and IRA.
• Partner with product, compliance, and operations to scope work and deliver production-ready solutions.
• Debug production issues and improve reliability, observability, and operational tooling.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with shared systems and platforms.
• Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems at scale.
• Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well.
• Build a product that our customers genuinely love.

Skills

APIs

Services

Data-heavy workflows

Mentoring

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Job description

Gusto is seeking an experienced engineer to own backend services and APIs that move money and assets for Gusto Retirement. You will ship production code, handle complex financial edge cases, and collaborate with product, compliance, and operations to deliver reliable software.

You will join the Financial Infrastructure team handling payments, settlements, tax, and integrations, working with cross-functional partners to deliver scalable, production-ready solutions in a fast-paced environment.