Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments and Risk

Gusto • Denver, CO; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Seattle, WA; Chicago,IL • 3d ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

This Senior Staff Software Engineer role sits at the heart of a SaaS platform where payments movement and risk controls are core product primitives, not add-ons. The remit spans re-architecting a payments platform and building risk infrastructure that supports fraud prevention, underwriting, and collections, which are domains where reliability, auditability, and correctness directly shape customer trust and platform viability.

For a long-term SaaS engineering career, this kind of work builds durable platform instincts. It offers experience designing extensible internal capabilities that multiple product teams depend on, navigating legacy modernization while keeping critical systems running, and making architectural decisions with clear operational consequences. Cross-functional collaboration with product, design, data science, and operations is also a strong signal of work that connects technical choices to measurable business outcomes in a subscription software environment.

The role best suits senior engineers who prefer end-to-end ownership of large initiatives and are comfortable turning ambiguous goals into pragmatic architecture. It will resonate with those who enjoy mentoring, influencing multiple teams, and working in test-driven, production-focused environments where scale and risk management require disciplined engineering tradeoffs.

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 Payments and Risk platforms. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by driving large technical architectural decisions (focusing on scale and modularity), 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:

Payments and Risk is responsible for all of the money management and movement operations that are used by our customers across a suite of businesses that all depend on money being moved safely between partners, employers, employees, government authorities and Gusto. In order to enable growth for Gusto and our customers, the Risk organization is responsible for defining best-in-class user experiences in order to mitigate financial and reputation risk. The Risk team is responsible for building the infrastructure for a.) bad actor platform capabilities to prevent fraudsters from abusing Gusto’s platform while improving false positive rate and, b.) the credit underwriting and collections platform to enable faster and greater access to credit while minimizing financial loss. The Payments team will be completely re-architecting the payments platform at Gusto to be able to move money fast and at scale.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Design, build, and test the infrastructure that enables our Payments teams and Risk policy and experience teams to efficiently build unique, custom tailored experiences for any existing or emerging products Gusto offers its customers
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, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
Build the software platform that powers multiple 1st and 3rd party products and serves millions of businesses.
Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions

Here’s what we're looking for:

Successful applicants have at least 12+ years of experience and the enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software as well as designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code that is maintainable, structured, and well-documented
An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
Experience in one of these domains is highly preferred: Payments and/or Risk
Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React

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 $191,000-$225,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $225,000-$265,000 in San Francisco and New York. 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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