Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits in a part of the SaaS stack that increasingly differentiates mature products: the internal platform that governs how software is shipped. The focus on Backstage and Crossplane signals a deliberate move toward platform engineering as a product, treating infrastructure workflows as reusable capabilities rather than bespoke support. The additional emphasis on AI-agent interfaces reflects a broader SaaS shift toward automating operational work through structured, auditable tooling.
For a long-term SaaS career, this is strong leverage because it builds fluency in the systems that make reliability and delivery speed scalable across many product teams. Work like paved-road design, rollout automation, and approval workflows translates across SaaS companies that run on Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code patterns. The role also develops a pragmatic product mindset applied to internal users, including measuring adoption and iterating on developer experience.
This position is best suited to senior engineers who enjoy cross-functional platform work and can navigate ambiguity while setting standards. It will appeal to those who like balancing reliability with usability, and who prefer building durable primitives and interfaces that other engineers and automated agents can safely depend on.
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:
Gusto's Platform Orchestration team is rebuilding how engineers ship at Gusto — turning operational toil into a product-grade self-service platform that AI agents can drive end-to-end. We sit at the intersection of Infrastructure Engineering, Developer Productivity, Security, and Product Engineering, and we enable self-service infrastructure capabilities through a Backstage-based Developer Portal and a Crossplane-based Platform Orchestrator. We automate as much as possible — safe rollouts of infrastructure and application changes, approval-based workflows, and the exposure of our entire toolchain to AI agents. We're embarking on a multi-year strategic effort to shift operational tasks into a product-driven platform so the broader Infrastructure group can focus on the future state of our systems.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design and implement an internal platform for engineers to build and deploy production-grade systems in a self-service manner
- Establish standards and build deterministic automation while optimizing for user accessibility and system reliability
- Collaborate with Infrastructure, Developer Productivity, and Security teams to deliver capabilities that delight our internal users
- Build the AI-agent surface for our platform — MCPs, Claude skills, and structured tool catalogs that let agents drive infrastructure and deployment workflows safely on behalf of internal users
- Iterate on the internal-platform UX with the same product instincts you'd apply to a customer-facing product — measure adoption, listen for friction, and ship improvements
- Drive paved-road-vs-exception decisions: when to harden a self-service path, when to make a one-off accommodation, and when to redirect to a different supported workflow
- Participate in an on-call rotation supporting the deployment of platform services and the management of underlying infrastructure
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of experience with modern programming languages, ideally Golang, Ruby, and/or TypeScript
- 5+ years of experience with Kubernetes, ideally using Crossplane to manage Infrastructure as Code
- Hands-on experience with AI-agent coding tools (Claude Code or similar) and demonstrated ability to design tooling for agentic consumption — MCPs, structured CLIs, documented tool contracts — beyond using AI as a chat companion
- Strong work ethic and self-starter who finds a way to operate effectively amidst ambiguity
- Systems-thinking approach to complex systems; identifies small changes that create big impact
- Resilient problem solver capable of prioritizing work that serves both immediate peers and the entire Gusto customer base
- Effective communicator who can simplify complex topics and communicate persuasive ideas
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000-$204,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000-$247,000 /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.
