Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Staff Software Engineer role sits in a core SaaS monetisation layer: the internal commerce platform that translates product strategy into catalog, subscription, promotion, and entitlement mechanics. In SaaS, these systems become the operational backbone for experimentation and go to market changes, and the listing signals ownership of that backbone rather than a single product surface.
For a long-term SaaS engineering path, the work builds durable platform leadership skills: designing APIs and distributed services that other teams depend on, setting reliability targets, and steering ambiguous initiatives from scoping through rollout and iteration. The cross functional touchpoints with product, data science, and growth oriented engineering groups reflect how mature SaaS organisations evolve pricing, packaging, and promotions through instrumentation and controlled change, not one off launches.
The role best matches an experienced engineer who prefers leverage over volume: enabling many downstream teams through clear architecture, operational rigor, and adoption minded platform design. It also suits someone comfortable balancing technical depth with stakeholder alignment, including mentoring and influencing without direct authority, in an environment where correctness and availability have direct business consequences.
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:
The Pricing & Packaging team is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead to drive the technical direction of Gusto’s internal Commerce Platform. You’ll own the architecture and delivery of systems that power how Gusto packages, prices, and delivers its products to over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. In this role, you’ll partner closely with product, data science, and cross-functional engineering teams to build reliable, scalable platform infrastructure that enables Gusto’s growth. If you’re energized by high-stakes platform work at the intersection of engineering excellence and real business impact, this role is for you.
About the Team:
The Pricing & Packaging team sits at the heart of Gusto’s Commerce infrastructure, serving as the single source of truth for all products, bundles, add-ons, subscriptions, pricing, promotions, and discounts across Gusto’s first-party customer experience. The team owns and operates Gusto’s internal Commerce Platform including the product catalog, promotion engine, subscription, pricing experimentation platform, and entitlement services that enable Growth and other teams to bring Gusto’s offerings to market effectively. We’re a collaborative team of engineers and a data scientist working on quarterly goals and monthly milestones, with a strong emphasis on platform reliability, adoption, and business impact. Our work directly shapes how Gusto’s 500,000+ small business customers access the payroll, benefits, and HR tools they rely on every day.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Lead technical design and architecture for the Commerce Platform including the product catalog, promotion engine, and subscription and entitlement systems, ensuring services are reliable, performant, and meet defined SLOs.
- Partner with product management and cross-functional engineering teams (Growth, Onboarding, Expansion) to define the platform’s technical roadmap and drive adoption across Gusto.
- Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous projects: from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration.
- Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical coaching, fostering a culture of craftsmanship and continuous improvement.
- Leverage AI tools such as code assistants, automated testing, and data-driven diagnostics — to accelerate engineering velocity and establish team-wide best practices for AI-augmented development.
- Own and improve platform observability, reliability, and performance: define and track SLOs, lead incident response, and drive blameless post-mortems to lasting resolution.
- Collaborate with Gusto’s marketing and business teams to evolve the self-serve system for managing products, bundles, promotions, and discounts, enabling faster time-to market for new offerings.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a tech lead or staff engineer role setting technical direction for a team.
- Has achieved mastery in at least one programming language (e.g. Ruby, Java, Python, Go)
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale backend platform systems ideally in commerce, billing, subscription management, pricing and packaging domain
- Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and service reliability practices, with experience defining and meeting SLOs in production environments.
- Demonstrated ability to work effectively with AI tools (such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) in day-to-day engineering, and a growth mindset toward evolving AI capabilities in the team’s workflow
- Proven track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives, influencing without authority, and aligning engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a shared technical vision
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical concepts accessible to both engineers and non-technical partners.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $189,000/yr to $236,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $223,000/yr to $278,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & 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.
