Staff Software Engineer, Commerce Platform & AI

Gusto; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 247,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the development of its internal Commerce Platform. You will own architecture and delivery of systems powering how we package, price, and deliver products to 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

Collaborate with product, data science, and cross-functional teams to build a reliable, scalable platform infrastructure and mentor engineers to foster craftsmanship and impact.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Experience building and operating large-scale backend platform systems, ideally in commerce, billing, subscription management, pricing, and packaging domains.
• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
• Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and service reliability practices, with experience defining and meeting SLOs in production environments.
• Ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives, influence without authority, and align engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
• Experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your product area.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical design and architecture for parts of the Commerce Platform, including the product catalog, promotion engine, and subscription and entitlement systems, ensuring services are reliable, performant, and meet business needs.
• Partner with product management and cross-functional engineering teams to define the platform’s technical roadmap and drive adoption across Gusto.
• Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous projects from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical coaching.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate engineering velocity and establish team-wide best practices for AI-augmented development.
• Collaborate with marketing and business teams to evolve the self-serve system for managing products, bundles, promotions, and discounts, enabling faster time-to-market for new offerings.

Skills

Backend systems

API design

Distributed systems

Leadership

Mentoring

AI tooling

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the development of its internal Commerce Platform. You will own architecture and delivery of systems powering how we package, price, and deliver products to 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

Collaborate with product, data science, and cross-functional teams to build a reliable, scalable platform infrastructure and mentor engineers to foster craftsmanship and impact.