Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

Gusto • Denver, CO;San Francisco, CA;New York, NY • 1w ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

This Principal Software Engineer role sits in the kind of SaaS infrastructure that tends to define a company’s reliability and differentiation: payroll and tax. In a subscription business where customers expect correctness every pay cycle, the engineering work is anchored in durability, auditability, and clear system boundaries. The listing points to core platform capabilities and extensibility, suggesting a mature product with established systems that still require meaningful evolution rather than greenfield novelty.

From a SaaS career perspective, the domain offers unusually transferable lessons in operating software that is both product-facing and operationally consequential. Work on ledgers, compliance-oriented engines, and shared payroll data interfaces builds experience in designing APIs and platforms that other teams depend on, and in making tradeoffs between correctness, performance, and maintainability. That combination maps well to long-lived SaaS products where platform constraints shape roadmap velocity.

The role is best suited to senior engineers who prefer end-to-end ownership and influence, from early specification through production stewardship. It will appeal to those who enjoy clarifying ambiguous problems across engineering, product, and compliance stakeholders, and who take satisfaction in making complex systems simpler for both customers and internal teams.

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 seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Payroll and Tax systems. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. Pay Group (payroll and tax) teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of the customers. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers, both internal and external.

Sub- Teams:

Tax Accuracy: The Tax Accuracy group is responsible for gathering and maintaining the necessary information for us to pay and file taxes accurately and on time for our customers, and consists of multiple teams that cover various parts of the process.
Ledger: This team is building a payroll ledger to track accrual accounting for payroll-related money movement. This team is starting to support the payroll domain, risk, payments, and accounting.
Engine: This team works closely with the payroll compliance team to ensure enablement of compliant pay, such as minimum wage adjustments, regular rate of pay, etc. We enable end-to-end success of payroll processing and working with various domain teams such as tax calculations, tax setup, payments, and more.
Platform: This team is developing a new platform to be the common interface for interacting with payroll and tax data. The payroll and tax domain is highly complex; our team exists to make it easier for other application teams to interact with the payroll and tax system. We enable application and experience teams to deliver customer value faster by providing a scalable, flexible, performant, and highly understandable platform to integrate with.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Payroll Services, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals
Design, build, and test the foundation that supports compliant payroll for millions of people
Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions
Drive the product development process from concept to launch, delivering delightful products that make payroll, taxes, and compliance simple and easy
Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build.
Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
Continuously stay up-to-date with advancements in AI and Machine Learning, applying this knowledge to our projects.

Here’s what we're looking for:

Successful applicants typically have at least 15+ years of experience
Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
Strong knowledge of data structures, data modeling, and system design
Experience working across 3+ teams, influencing both product and team direction
Experience working on platform products which are depended upon throughout the company
Experience engineering, designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production
An aptitude in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex problems, communicating technical complexity and facilitating informed tradeoffs to major stakeholders
Experience operationalizing and scaling large interconnected production systems
Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
Experience in complex highly regulated domains
- Examples: HR, Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
Experience using AI tools to build, test, and iterate on products quickly.
Understanding of how to evaluate AI-driven outputs using clear success criteria.
A commitment to staying current on emerging backend technologies and AI frameworks and patterns, regularly experimenting with new approaches.
Willingness to contribute to shared tools or templates that enhance the speed and safety of AI experimentation.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $215,000/yr to $252,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $251,000/yr to $295,000/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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