Staff Software Engineer, Payments / Risk

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

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the payments or risk platforms, shaping architecture and delivering core services. You’ll own the full lifecycle, mentor engineers, and help scale a Ruby on Rails + JavaScript/React application used by millions of customers.

This hybrid role is based in San Francisco or Denver with travel as needed and requires 8+ years of software experience and a passion for secure money movement and fraud prevention.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Experience building scalable money-movement platforms.
• Experience leveraging AI tools to accelerate development.
• Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks.
• Ability to mentor engineers and own multi-quarter projects.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test core services for payments or risk platforms.
• Mentor engineers and drive performance and reliability at scale.
• Help scale a large Ruby on Rails and JavaScript/React application.
• Collaborate with product, data, design, and operations teams to solve problems and ship features.
• Build trusted platforms that teams rely on and that customers love.

Skills

8+ years software development

Ruby on Rails

JavaScript/React

AI tools experience

AI frameworks experimentation

Mentoring engineers

Job description

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join the teams behind Gusto's payments and risk platforms to serve small business owners every day.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full lifecycle of either the payments or risk system: shaping architecture early in the design process, building self-service internal features and APIs, and owning their performance long after launch. That means engineering the core business engine, enabling product teams with reliable backend services, and setting the engineering standard for those around you.

If you're drawn to enabling world-class money movement or financial risk system with impact — helping power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us!

About the Teams:

Payments – The Payments team owns all money movement operations across Gusto's suite of products — enabling funds to move safely between partners, employers, employees, and government authorities. As a Payments Engineer, you'll build new payments capabilities across US and international markets, and help rearchitect our payments platform to scale for the future.

Risk – The Risk team builds best-in-class experiences that protect Gusto and our customers from financial and reputational harm. As a Risk Engineer, you'll develop infrastructure for two core areas: bad actor prevention — stopping fraudsters from abusing Gusto's platform while reducing false positives — and credit underwriting and collections, enabling faster, broader access to credit while minimizing financial loss.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, build, and test Gusto core money movement or risk platform services – payment rails, ledgering, wallets, fraud, decisioning engine, KYC, AML, and compliance capabilities, among others
• Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate with our Product Engineering, Product Management, Data, Design, and financial operations teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch
• Build platforms that engineering teams rely on, and trust to deliver products that our customers genuinely love

Here’s what we're looking for:

• Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
• Passion for creating scalable, efficient money movement platforms for users
• Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new platform capabilities
• Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable user impact at scale
• Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your platform area
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact

Others:

• Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails
• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
• Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
• Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders

Do you prefer a non-payments or risk-specific platform role instead? Check out our Staff Software Engineer, Core Platforms job listing.

Please note that a two day travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.