Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Staff backend role sits at a classic SaaS junction: time tracking as a system of record that must stay consistent across scheduling, time off, and payroll. The emphasis on high-performance APIs and payroll integrations signals a product surface area where reliability, data correctness, and partner-style interfaces matter as much as feature delivery—core concerns in mature SaaS platforms serving business operations.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work maps to durable, transferable themes: designing public and internal APIs, evolving data models over time, and operating services that carry business-critical workflows. The remit spans technical design leadership, performance and reliability tuning, and production troubleshooting—experience that translates well to other SaaS domains where integrations and platform capabilities drive adoption.
This position is best suited to engineers who prefer shaping architecture and engineering standards while staying close to implementation. It fits professionals comfortable aligning with product and design on specifications, and who enjoy mentoring through reviews and technical guidance. Remote flexibility across many North American hubs also aligns with senior-level collaboration patterns common in distributed SaaS engineering organizations.
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:
Join Gusto's Time engineering team as a Senior Staff Software Engineer (Backend) and play a key role in shaping the future of how businesses manage time. You'll be responsible for designing, building, and scaling high-performance APIs that power our time tracking and payroll integrations. You'll have the opportunity to lead projects, collaborate with talented engineers, and mentor others while contributing to a product that impacts millions of users. This is a chance to make a real difference in how businesses operate and help them streamline their most valuable resource: time.
About the Team:
The Time engineering team is a passionate and collaborative group dedicated to building intuitive and reliable time management solutions for Gusto's customers. We value innovation, ownership, and continuous learning. We're a tight-knit team that enjoys tackling complex challenges and celebrating our successes together. As a member of our team, you'll have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies, contribute to a product that makes a real difference, and grow your skills alongside some of the best engineers in the industry.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, develop, and maintain APIs for time tracking, scheduling, time off, and payroll integration.
- Collaborate with product managers and designers to define API specifications and ensure seamless integration with other Gusto products.
- Lead the technical design and implementation of new features and enhancements to our time management platform.
- Mentor and guide junior engineers, providing technical guidance and support.
- Write clean, well-documented, and testable code.
- Participate in code reviews and contribute to improving our engineering practices.
- Work with large-scale data stores and optimize for performance and reliability.
- Troubleshoot and resolve production issues related to time-tracking and API functionality
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on backend development.
- 8+ years of experience building and maintaining backend systems.
- Strong understanding of API design principles and best practices.
- Experience with relational databases and data modeling.
- Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Python, Go).
- Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
Nice to haves:
- Experience with Ruby on Rails.
- Prior experience in a technical leadership role.
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.