Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a point where many SaaS companies are investing heavily: internal platforms that improve how product teams ship. Rather than building end user features, the focus is on AI enabled developer tooling that becomes part of the company’s software delivery system, with security and reliability treated as first class concerns. In the SaaS ecosystem, that kind of work increasingly separates teams that can scale engineering output from those that cannot.
Career wise, the role offers compounding exposure to the mechanics behind modern SaaS execution: platform APIs, CI and CD integration, evaluation and guardrails for LLM powered systems, and the operational realities of latency, cost, and drift. Experience building context aware AI workflows and multi agent automation inside a large codebase is likely to remain portable across SaaS organizations adopting similar patterns for productivity and quality.
This position tends to fit engineers who prefer broad technical ownership and influence across many teams, and who enjoy turning ambiguous workflow pain into durable infrastructure. It also suits someone comfortable balancing experimentation with production discipline, and who can communicate architectural tradeoffs to partners in infrastructure, security, and product engineering.
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 a Staff Engineer on the Developer Productivity - AI Developer Tools team, you will be the architectural anchor shaping the AI platform that accelerates engineering across Gusto. You will redefine how our entire engineering organization builds, tests, and ships software by architecting a highly secure, context-aware, "AI-native" development lifecycle.
Your mission is to eliminate developer friction through AI tools, multi-agent systems, and intelligent automation. Whether you are building bespoke internal coding assistants, automating sprawling codebase refactors, or deploying AI to self-heal CI/CD pipelines, your work will directly multiply the velocity of hundreds of builders. Help us drive developer productivity by building the next generation of AI tools.
About the Team:
The AI Developer Tools team is a specialized team within Developer Productivity. We believe AI is the next great leap in software craftsmanship. Our goal is to provide every builder at Gusto with a suite of "superpowers" tools that deeply understand our codebase and absorb operational toil so engineers can focus on creative problem-solving. We treat our fellow engineers as our primary customers, prioritizing developer experiences that are not just powerful, but absolutely delightful to use.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Architect AI Core Infrastructure: Design, scale, and maintain the internal platform and APIs that integrate LLMs into the developer workflow, with a heavy focus on autonomous agents, custom retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and smart context-delivery systems.
- Drive Technical Leadership & Vision: Establish engineering best practices for building with AI at Gusto, including robust evaluation frameworks (evals), guardrails for code safety, and strategies for optimizing model latency and token spend.
- Collaborate & Evangelize: Partner closely with product engineering teams to uncover systemic friction points, and collaborate with core Infrastructure and Security teams to ensure all AI tooling is scalable, compliant, and secure.
- Optimize Feedback Loops: Identify and eliminate critical bottlenecks in the local-to-production lifecycle at scale across Gusto.
- Maintain Enterprise Reliability: Treat AI infrastructure with production-grade rigor. Monitor system health, diagnose complex integration or networking issues, and mitigate model drift or downtime.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ Years of Systems Expertise: You are a seasoned engineer who is highly comfortable navigating massive, complex codebases and delivering production-grade, distributed software.
- Production AI Experience: You have a proven track record of moving AI beyond prototypes. You possess a deep understanding of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG architectures, and orchestrating multi-agent workflows.
- Developer-First Mindset: You are passionate about Developer Experience and Productivity. You intuitively understand what makes an internal tool frictionless, fast, and empowering for other engineers.
- Strategic Execution: You don't just build wrappers; you think deeply about data privacy, security, cost management, and systemic reliability when deploying AI solutions.
- Exceptional Communication: You can seamlessly translate bleeding-edge AI capabilities into clear, actionable infrastructure strategies, mentoring junior engineers and aligning cross-functional stakeholders along the way.
- Working as a Team: You work across team boundaries and bring other teams and groups along with you towards our strategic vision.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $180,000/yr to $200,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, $220,000/yr to $245,000/yr for San Francisco, New York & Seattle. 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.
