Staff Software Engineer, PEO Growth

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (RSUs)

Job summary

Gusto is building a PEO growth product—a co-employer service handling payroll, benefits, workers' compensation, and HR compliance. As a Staff Engineer on PEO Growth, you will own the onboarding path from discovery to full setup, shaping how a small business adopts one of the company’s most consequential products.

You’ll influence cross-team design, apply AI-enabled tooling, and drive high-quality, scalable experiences across markets with ownership and fast iteration at the core.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase.
• Full-stack expertise: server-side and frontend; Rails/React/TypeScript are desirable but depth matters more.
• AI fluency: you use AI tooling in daily engineering work and can discuss where it helps or not.
• High ownership in ambiguity: turn fuzzy business needs into buildable solutions and ship.
• Strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries with a track record of uplifting others.
• Bonus: growth experience—funnels, conversion, or product configuration.
• Bachelor's degree in CS or related field or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the PEO Onboarding experience end to end — from discovery to full setup.
• Set technical direction: turn ambiguous bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions.
• Build in a regulated domain prioritizing quality and accuracy.
• Partner across app teams to unify the journey and manage ownership seams.
• Use AI to assist coding, reviews, and onboarding, embedding AI guidance.

Skills

AI fluency

Full-stack development

Ownership in ambiguity

Cross-team collaboration

Product-surface ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Ruby on Rails

React/TypeScript

Job description

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

Gusto is building a PEO (Professional Employer Organization): a product where Gusto becomes a co-employer for small businesses, taking on payroll, benefits, workers' compensation, and HR compliance so owners don't have to assemble it themselves. It's one of the biggest strategic bets in the company. As a Staff Engineer on PEO Growth, you'll own the path from how a business discovers PEO all the way to getting the business fully set up. The decisions you make here shape whether a small business can adopt one of the most consequential products we've ever shipped, or give up halfway through.

About the Team

PEO Growth owns the customer experience of adopting the PEO — the end-to-end journey that takes a business from interested to fully up and running. Much of what that journey depends on is built by other teams across Gusto, so our job is to make it feel like one coherent product rather than a series of handoffs. That makes the work as much cross-team design and negotiation as it is code, and it means you'll have real influence over how the experience gets shaped, not just how it's implemented. The team is a pod of engineers, product manager, and designer with a bias towards building and shipping.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day

• 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.

Here's what we're looking for

• 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 a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

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.