Staff Software Engineer (Professional Employer Organization)

Gusto; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Gender-affirming care and support

Family care and fertility benefits

Mental health resources

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Free meals and refreshments at office

Paid time off and holidays

Job summary

Gusto in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the PEO onboarding journey from discovery to full setup. You will shape the end-to-end experience and set the technical direction for a complex, regulated domain.

You’ll work across product, design, and other engineering teams to deliver a coherent journey, infuse AI tooling into workflows, and raise the bar on reliability, testing, and observability.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated AI fluency and ability to discuss practical use of AI tooling in day-to-day engineering work.
• Strong full-stack capabilities across server-side and modern frontend.
• Experience with growth-focused funnels, product configuration, or related systems is a plus.
• High ownership in ambiguous business needs and ability to ship with incomplete specs.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering, including customer-facing surfaces.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in CS or related field.

Responsibilities

• Own the PEO Onboarding experience end-to-end from discovery to setup.
• Turn ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate domains into a coherent journey.
• Use AI as a normal part of work, and raise engineering bar with reviews, testing, and observability.

Skills

AI fluency

Full-stack

Ruby on Rails

React/TypeScript

Ownership in ambiguity

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related

Tools

Ruby on Rails

React/TypeScript

Job description

• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Gender-affirming care and support
• Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
• A variety of mental health resources
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
• Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more

• 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
• 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
• [Bonus] Experience in growth — funnels, conversion, plan and product configuration, or the systems that turn a purchase decision into a provisioned customer
• 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
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time owning customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase
• A strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries, with a track record of leveling up the engineers around you
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience