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.
