Staff Software Engineer – Core Products (Full‑Stack, Scale)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (RSUs)

Competitive base pay

Total Rewards

Job summary

Gusto is seeking seasoned Staff Software Engineers to work on customer-facing products used by small businesses and their employees. You will influence product direction, own features from design through launch, and contribute across frontend and backend systems to deliver scalable, reliable experiences.

The role emphasizes mentorship, ownership, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to solve complex engineering challenges at scale and to drive measurable customer impact.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Experience building scalable solutions that reduce customer pain or improve experience.
• Experience leveraging AI tools to accelerate development and testing.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize performance and impact.
• Ownership of multi-quarter projects solving complex engineering problems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test Gusto core products (Payroll, Benefits, HR, Retirement, etc.).
• Mentor other engineers to solve hard technical problems at scale.
• Help scale a large Ruby/Rails and JavaScript/React application.
• Collaborate with Product, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering to address customer pain points, prototype, iterate, and launch.
• Build products that customers genuinely love.

Skills

10+ years exp

AI tooling experience

Mentoring engineers

Frontend & Backend

Ownership mindset

Tools

Ruby on Rails

JavaScript React

Job description

Gusto is seeking seasoned Staff Software Engineers to work on customer-facing products used by small businesses and their employees. You will influence product direction, own features from design through launch, and contribute across frontend and backend systems to deliver scalable, reliable experiences.

The role emphasizes mentorship, ownership, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to solve complex engineering challenges at scale and to drive measurable customer impact.