Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the heart of a mature SaaS product where payments and risk are not side features but foundational platform capabilities. Within the SaaS ecosystem, work like money movement, ledgering, identity and compliance functions tends to become a shared internal substrate that many product surfaces depend on, which makes the engineering decisions unusually durable and highly leveraged.
For a SaaS career, the value is in owning systems that must be correct, observable, and resilient over long horizons, not just shipped once. The remit spans architecture involvement, internal self service APIs, and post launch performance stewardship, which maps closely to how platform engineering operates in subscription businesses at scale. Exposure to fraud prevention, underwriting and collections, or global payment rails also builds domain fluency that transfers across fintech adjacent SaaS and any product with monetization, billing, or trust and safety constraints.
This is best suited to senior engineers who prefer end to end ownership and influence across multiple teams, and who enjoy mentoring as part of the job rather than as an occasional task. It will appeal to those comfortable balancing product enablement with platform rigor, and who like iterating with cross functional partners while keeping reliability and risk tradeoffs explicit.
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 looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join the teams behind Gusto's payments and risk platforms to serve small business owners every day.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full lifecycle of either the payments or risk system: shaping architecture early in the design process, building self-service internal features and APIs, and owning their performance long after launch. That means engineering the core business engine, enabling product teams with reliable backend services, and setting the engineering standard for those around you.
If you're drawn to enabling world-class money movement or financial risk system with impact — helping power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us!
About the Teams:
Payments – The Payments team owns all money movement operations across Gusto's suite of products — enabling funds to move safely between partners, employers, employees, and government authorities. As a Payments Engineer, you'll build new payments capabilities across US and international markets, and help rearchitect our payments platform to scale for the future.
Risk – The Risk team builds best-in-class experiences that protect Gusto and our customers from financial and reputational harm. As a Risk Engineer, you'll develop infrastructure for two core areas: bad actor prevention — stopping fraudsters from abusing Gusto's platform while reducing false positives — and credit underwriting and collections, enabling faster, broader access to credit while minimizing financial loss.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and test Gusto core money movement or risk platform services – payment rails, ledgering, wallets, fraud, decisioning engine, KYC, AML, and compliance capabilities, among others
- Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
- Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
- Collaborate with our Product Engineering, Product Management, Data, Design, and financial operations teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch
- Build platforms that engineering teams rely on, and trust to deliver products that our customers genuinely love
Here’s what we're looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
- Passion for creating scalable, efficient money movement platforms for users
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new platform capabilities
- Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable user impact at scale
- Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your platform area
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
Others:
- Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails
- Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
- Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
Do you prefer a non-payments or risk-specific platform role instead? Check out our Staff Software Engineer, Core Platforms job listing.
Please note that a two day travel to a Gusto 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 $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & 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.
