Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer role sits in the kind of SaaS infrastructure that determines whether a product can scale reliably: payroll and tax. In a subscription business, the platform’s credibility is tied to accuracy, auditability, and predictable operations, and this listing points to work on foundational capabilities that other teams and customer experiences depend on across Gusto’s payroll stack.
For a long-term SaaS engineering career, the value is in repeated exposure to high-stakes systems design where correctness and change management matter as much as shipping features. Building extensible services, shared interfaces, and domain platforms translates well to other SaaS companies that run on complex workflows, money movement, or regulated data. The emphasis on end-to-end project influence also develops the product-minded leadership expected at senior levels in SaaS engineering orgs.
This role is best suited to someone who prefers platform leverage over isolated feature work, and who enjoys turning messy domain rules into clear APIs, data models, and operationally sound services. It will fit engineers who are comfortable coordinating across multiple teams and functions, and who want their technical decisions to shape how a broader SaaS product is built and maintained.
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:
We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Payroll and Tax systems. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!
About the Team:
Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. Pay Group (payroll and tax) teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of the customers. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers, both internal and external.
Sub- Teams:
- Tax Accuracy: The Tax Accuracy group is responsible for gathering and maintaining the necessary information for us to pay and file taxes accurately and on time for our customers, and consists of multiple teams that cover various parts of the process.
- Ledger: This team is building a payroll ledger to track accrual accounting for payroll-related money movement. This team is starting to support the payroll domain, risk, payments, and accounting.
- Engine: This team works closely with the payroll compliance team to ensure enablement of compliant pay, such as minimum wage adjustments, regular rate of pay, etc. We enable end-to-end success of payroll processing and working with various domain teams such as tax calculations, tax setup, payments, and more.
- Platform: This team is developing a new platform to be the common interface for interacting with payroll and tax data. The payroll and tax domain is highly complex; our team exists to make it easier for other application teams to interact with the payroll and tax system. We enable application and experience teams to deliver customer value faster by providing a scalable, flexible, performant, and highly understandable platform to integrate with.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Payroll Services, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals
- Design, build, and test the foundation that supports compliant payroll for millions of people
- Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
- Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
- Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions
- Drive the product development process from concept to launch, delivering delightful products that make payroll, taxes, and compliance simple and easy
- Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build.
- Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
- Continuously stay up-to-date with advancements in AI and Machine Learning, applying this knowledge to our projects.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have at least 15+ years of experience
- Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
- Strong knowledge of data structures, data modeling, and system design
- Experience working across 3+ teams, influencing both product and team direction
- Experience working on platform products which are depended upon throughout the company
- Experience engineering, designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production
- An aptitude in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex problems, communicating technical complexity and facilitating informed tradeoffs to major stakeholders
- Experience operationalizing and scaling large interconnected production systems
- Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Experience in complex highly regulated domains
- Examples: HR, Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
- Experience using AI tools to build, test, and iterate on products quickly.
- Understanding of how to evaluate AI-driven outputs using clear success criteria.
- A commitment to staying current on emerging backend technologies and AI frameworks and patterns, regularly experimenting with new approaches.
- Willingness to contribute to shared tools or templates that enhance the speed and safety of AI experimentation.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $215,000/yr to $252,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $251,000/yr to $295,000/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.
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