Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the intersection of SaaS product delivery and platform-scale engineering, focused on customer-facing systems that underpin recurring, operationally critical workflows. Work across payroll, benefits, and related surfaces signals a mature SaaS environment where reliability, correctness, and long-lived product evolution matter as much as feature throughput, especially when changes affect core business operations.
For a SaaS career, the value here is breadth across the full product lifecycle paired with depth in complex domains. Ownership from early specification through post-launch iteration builds the kind of end-to-end product engineering judgment that transfers across established SaaS companies. The emphasis on scalable backend APIs, modern frontend delivery, and cross-functional collaboration mirrors how high-performing SaaS orgs translate customer pain into durable capabilities. Exposure to AI tooling and emerging frameworks also reflects a practical, applied approach to improving delivery and quality in production systems.
This role is best suited to senior engineers who prefer shaping direction as well as writing code, and who are comfortable being accountable for outcomes over multiple quarters. It will appeal to those who like mentoring, navigating tradeoffs in large codebases, and improving performance and reliability without losing sight of product impact.
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 looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join the teams behind Gusto's customer-facing products — the features and experiences that small business owners and their employees rely on every day.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. That means writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships.
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 test Gusto core products such as Payroll, Benefits, HR, Retirement, Gusto Money, Gusto Solo, and Gusto Pro, among others
- Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
- Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
- Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch daily
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
Here’s what we're looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
- Experience buildingscalable solutions that eliminate customer pain; passion for creating memorable experiences for customers
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
- Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
- Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your product area
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
Please note that a two day travel to a Gusto 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.
