Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Staff Developer Productivity role sits in a part of the SaaS stack that becomes critical as product surface area grows: the internal platforms that keep delivery reliable. The focus on asynchronous processing and background-job infrastructure signals a mature environment where multiple applications depend on shared primitives like Kafka-style messaging and job orchestration, and where resilience under load is a first-order concern.
For a long-term SaaS engineering career, work like this builds leverage. Improving feedback loops, APIs, and tooling for product engineers develops a platform mindset that transfers across SaaS companies with sizable codebases. The remit also points to experience with iterative design and measurement, plus large-scale migrations supported by AI tooling, all of which are increasingly common as SaaS organizations modernize systems without pausing feature delivery.
This role is best suited to senior engineers who prefer broad, cross-team impact over owning a single product area. It favors people who can treat other engineers as customers, communicate architectural tradeoffs clearly, and make pragmatic improvements that compound over time. It will appeal to those drawn to reliability, scalability, and developer experience as core SaaS differentiators rather than background concerns.
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.