Staff Software Engineer - Payroll Platform

Gusto • Denver, CO;San Francisco, CA;New York, NY;Seattle, WA; Los Angeles, CA • 2d ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

Payroll is a classic “infrastructure SaaS” problem: high-volume transactions, strict correctness, and constant regulatory change. A Staff Engineer on a Payroll Platform team sits at the layer where product velocity depends on durable internal APIs and well-modeled domain services. The description also signals a platform remit that serves multiple internal product surfaces and external partners via embedded payroll, which is a common SaaS pattern for extending distribution through integrations.

For a long-term SaaS engineering career, this kind of role builds leverage. Designing shared services used by many teams develops judgment around API contracts, backward compatibility, observability, and operational maturity—skills that translate across SaaS companies building multi-product suites. The regulated payroll domain adds depth in reliability and compliance-aware engineering, where failures are costly and “correct by construction” matters as much as feature output.

This role fits an engineer who prefers enabling other builders rather than owning a single UI-facing feature area. It will suit someone comfortable taking end-to-end responsibility for a domain, writing and driving design docs, and partnering across teams to shape adoption. The mention of AI-assisted development tools also points to a practitioner who can model pragmatic usage patterns and help normalize them within an engineering organization.

The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.

Job Description

About the Role:

We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto’s Payroll Platform team, where you’ll build backend product infrastructure that powers payroll experiences across Gusto. This is a fully backend role focused on designing and evolving internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll. You’ll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar on how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company.

About the Team:

The Payroll Platform team builds the foundational services that make payroll possible at Gusto. Our customers are internal product teams building payroll, time, contractor, and accountant experiences, as well as external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll. We focus on creating reliable, performant, and well-designed APIs that abstract away payroll complexity and enable teams to move faster with confidence. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams
Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution
Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases
Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals
Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as we scale payroll processing for hundreds of thousands of businesses
Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions
Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and documentation, and help normalize and spread effective usage across the team.

Here’s what we're looking for:

- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
- Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support multiple product teams
- Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration
- Strong system design skills, including experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems
- Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage
- Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required

Please note that travel to Gusto’s Denver 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/yr to $204,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000/yr to $247,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & 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.

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