Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
### Why this Role is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the intersection of SaaS growth engineering and applied AI, focused on customer acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle engagement. The remit spans AI voice onboarding and LLM-driven email generation, two product surfaces that are increasingly central to how subscription businesses reduce friction, personalize experiences, and operationalize communication at scale. It is also notable for its emphasis on production ownership rather than standalone experimentation, which is where many AI initiatives in SaaS succeed or fail.
For a SaaS career, the work maps directly to durable company-wide levers: improving funnel performance, building reusable systems for messaging and orchestration, and establishing evaluation and observability practices for AI features in real customer journeys. Experience here tends to translate across SaaS categories because onboarding workflows, lifecycle communications, and experimentation loops are common patterns, regardless of product domain or customer segment.
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
We’re looking for a seasoned full-stack software engineer to join Gusto’s Growth team and lead the next generation of AI-powered customer acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle engagement experiences. This role is best suited for an engineer who enjoys operating across the full product lifecycle, from shaping early concepts and technical direction through launch, evaluation, iteration, and long-term ownership in production.
On this team, you’ll help define and build customer-facing AI systems that make Growth experiences more effective, more personalized, and easier to scale. In particular, this role will focus on two strategic areas: building an AI Voice Agent that supports onboarding of new customers, and building and scaling AI-driven email experiences across the funnel powered by ACE, our LLM-powered content generation engine. The expectation is not just experimentation, but clear ownership of production workflows and measurable customer impact within Growth.
If you're drawn to work that combines technical craft with real-world impact — helping power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us!
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and operate AI-powered Growth experiences across onboarding and lifecycle engagement, with a focus on conversational and communication-driven product surfaces.
- Own the technical strategy and implementation for an AI Voice Agent that helps onboard customers, including the product workflows, backend integrations, safety controls, and evaluation loops needed to make the experience reliable in production.
- Build and scale AI-driven email systems across the funnel using ACE, including generation workflows, orchestration, experimentation, quality controls, and iteration based on product feedback and business outcomes.
- Partner closely with Product, Data, Design, Marketing, and Platform teams to understand customer pain points, identify Growth opportunities, prototype quickly, and ship improvements that move acquisition, activation, and conversion metrics.
- Design reliable APIs, backend services, and frontend experiences that support personalized onboarding, communications, workflow automation, and other customer-facing Growth journeys.
- Establish strong engineering patterns for applied AI development, including prompt design, tool integration, evaluation-driven iteration, observability, and safe rollout practices.
- Help the team make good long-term architectural decisions around conversational systems, outbound communication workflows, and the supporting platform capabilities they depend on.
- Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on technical execution, product quality, and responsible use of AI across the team.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience building and shipping customer-facing product experiences at scale.
- Experience building full-stack systems, including frontend applications, backend APIs, and production services with clear ownership after launch.
- Experience in Growth-related product areas such as onboarding, communications, workflow automation, CRM, lifecycle marketing, or adjacent customer journey systems.
- Strong applied AI fluency, including experience with prompt design, tool integration, conversational experiences, content generation systems, or evaluation-driven iteration.
- Experience owning multi-quarter initiatives that solve ambiguous engineering problems and produce measurable business and customer impact.
- Strong product and engineering judgment, with the ability to balance experimentation speed with quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Ability to collaborate effectively across engineering and business stakeholders, especially in product areas where technical decisions directly affect customer experience and funnel performance.
- A track record of mentoring engineers and helping teams scale their 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
Please note that travel to Gusto's 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.
