Staff Engineer, PEO Growth - Onboarding & AI

Gusto; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 247,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Engineer for the PEO Growth team to own the onboarding journey from discovery to setup, shaping a scalable, AI-enabled experience for small businesses. You’ll drive technical direction and collaborate across teams to deliver a coherent journey with strong ownership.

You’ll work in a cross-functional pod with product and design, contributing to a trusted, regulated domain while applying AI tools to accelerate delivery and improve onboarding outcomes.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time owning customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase.
• Strong full-stack range: comfortable in a mature server-side codebase and in a modern component-based frontend. Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript are what we use and are desirable, but we care more about depth than the specific stack.
• Demonstrated AI fluency: you already use AI tooling in your day-to-day engineering work, can speak concretely about where it helps and where it doesn't, and you keep up as the tooling changes.
• High ownership in ambiguity. You can take a fuzzy business need, shape it into something buildable, and ship it without waiting for a perfect spec — and you anticipate what the team will need next instead of reacting to it.
• A strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries, with a track record of leveling up the engineers around you.
• [Bonus] Experience in growth — funnels, conversion, plan and product configuration, or the systems that turn a purchase decision into a provisioned customer.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the PEO Onboarding experience end to end — how a business learns about the PEO, commits to it, and gets set up on it — and be accountable for whether customers make it all the way through.
• Set technical direction: turn ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions that hold up as the product and its audience grow.
• Build in a regulated domain where quality and accuracy is critical.
• Partner across other app teams to integrate their domains into one coherent journey, and negotiate the seams when ownership is unclear.
• Use AI as a normal part of how you work — coding agents, review, debugging, and codebase exploration — and help build AI-assisted guidance into the onboarding experience itself so customers get unstuck without waiting on a human.
• Instrument the funnel and make decisions from it: define what "onboarding is working" means, measure it, and use experiments rather than intuition to decide what to change.
• Raise the engineering bar in a fast-moving area — reviews, testing strategy, observability, and the judgment calls about where to build carefully and where to move fast.

Skills

8+ years of professional software eng

Full-stack

Ruby on Rails

React/TypeScript

AI fluency

Ownership in ambiguity

Collaborator and influencer

Growth experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Staff Engineer for the PEO Growth team to own the onboarding journey from discovery to setup, shaping a scalable, AI-enabled experience for small businesses. You’ll drive technical direction and collaborate across teams to deliver a coherent journey with strong ownership.

You’ll work in a cross-functional pod with product and design, contributing to a trusted, regulated domain while applying AI tools to accelerate delivery and improve onboarding outcomes.