Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Staff Developer Productivity role stands out in SaaS because it targets the internal platform layer that determines how quickly product teams can ship and how safely systems evolve. The focus on asynchronous processing—Sidekiq, Kafka, and event-driven communication—maps directly to the operational realities of mature SaaS products where background work, integrations, and high-throughput workflows are core to reliability.
Career-wise, the position builds durable SaaS leverage: designing abstractions used by many engineers, shaping migration strategies (including AI-assisted large-scale changes), and establishing feedback loops that improve build-and-deploy cycles. Work at this level tends to develop strong platform judgment—balancing developer experience with runtime performance, observability, and incident resilience—skills that transfer across SaaS companies with multi-service architectures and growing application portfolios.
The role is best suited for an experienced engineer who prefers cross-cutting impact over single-feature ownership and is comfortable treating other engineers as customers. It fits someone who enjoys architectural problem-solving, measuring outcomes, and iterating on infrastructure that must handle varied workloads. It will appeal to professionals who want to influence how a SaaS engineering organization operates day to day, not just what it delivers.
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:
As an Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Developer Productivity - Async team, you will work on improving developer productivity by enhancing the tools and systems used by product engineers. You will focus on asynchronous processing, ensuring that our applications are efficient, reliable, and scalable. Your work will involve maintaining and improving the infrastructure that supports background jobs and asynchronous communication between our applications using technologies such as Sidekiq and Karafka.
About the Team:
We strive to improve developer productivity through our work on the tools engineers use, the systems we create, and the organizational processes that drive engineering work. We hire technical experts who take a broad view of engineering focused impact and love lifting up their colleagues.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Identify and solve inefficiencies in the tooling, APIs, and feedback mechanisms available to product engineers to improve developer productivity.
- Design, pitch, plan, measure, and implement solutions iteratively, utilizing AI tools to perform large scale code migrations.
- Collaborate closely with product engineering colleagues to anticipate and address upcoming changes.
- Develop and maintain services, abstractions, and architecture to support product engineering.
- Advance the use of Kafka and Sidekiq for asynchronous processing and communication for the growing number of applications at Gusto.
- Harden the async infrastructure to be resilient in the face of heavy loads across a wide variety of use cases.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 12+ years of professional software development experience with a track record of driving impact at scale.
- Systems thinker with a strong ability to communicate effectively.
- Comfortable with architectural thinking and delivering solutions through code.
- Experience with Rails and Ruby, including developer tooling for large engineering teams.
- Ability to work with colleagues as both customers and partners.
- Active working knowledge and architecture experience with Ruby.
- Experience with asynchronous processing using Sidekiq and/or Kafka.
- Proven track record of improving developer productivity through tooling and infrastructure enhancements with the assistance of AI.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
