Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a core SaaS junction where product experience and regulatory correctness meet. Tax workflows are a recurring, high-stakes surface area in payroll platforms, and the listing signals ownership of what customers touch end to end, from onboarding through ongoing management, payments, and filings. Within the SaaS ecosystem, that combination of customer-facing UX and durable compliance systems tends to shape retention and trust as much as it shapes feature velocity.
Career-wise, the position offers a strong path for engineers who want to deepen full-stack leadership in a domain that rewards precision, observability, and incremental architecture improvements. The work implies frequent cross-functional decision-making with product, design, data, compliance, and operations, which is a common reality in mature SaaS organizations where software behavior must align with policy and external agencies. Experience designing sustainable systems in a complex codebase also transfers well to other platform-heavy SaaS environments.
The role is best suited to senior engineers who prefer shaping technical strategy while still shipping, and who enjoy turning ambiguous requirements into clear interfaces and workflows. It fits professionals comfortable mentoring and collaborating closely, especially those motivated by reducing customer effort in complex administrative tasks and applying AI-assisted development practices pragmatically.
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 Team:
We’re a small group of talented engineers, designers, data scientists, and product managers working to improve the experience of collecting, calculating, paying, and filing taxes. Our team aims to make the complexity of dealing with hundreds of tax agencies disappear and to make compliance easy.
We own everything a customer sees and does around taxes: from onboarding through ongoing account management, payments, and filings. We make sure that communication about those experiences is clear and actionable, and that the underlying systems are reasonable and sustainable to build on.
This team is responsible for the full stack of work, not just the frontend. We implement work up and down the stack to build these delightful experiences, and we partner regularly with all of the teams in the Tax Organization and many teams outside of it as well.
This is one of the most important teams at Gusto. Most companies know how to pay their people, but many companies don't know how to properly withhold, pay, or file taxes. One of the reasons that they pay for Gusto every month is the exact product that we provide.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Execute on the technical strategy for your team's domain in alignment with team and group-level OKRs, and contribute to the broader Tax Engineering roadmap through collaboration.
- Design, build, and test the experience that enables people to add and update their tax information at Gusto.
- Advocate for the needs of our customers, employers and employees who rely on Gusto to ensure that their taxes are collected, calculated, and filed correctly.
- Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships across Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams.
- Support the software platform that powers multiple 1st and 3rd party products and serves millions of businesses.
- 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 design systems, components, and interfaces you build.
- Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation.
- Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture.
- Apply AI tools as a regular part of your engineering workflow, and bring an AI-native lens to product decisions: identify where AI can reduce customer effort, simplify complex tax workflows, and surface proactive guidance before customers know they need it.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with expertise in React, TypeScript, as well as experience with Ruby on Rails, SQL, or other backend languages
- Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
- Experience working in large, complex codebases and a demonstrated ability to improve them incrementally without breaking things. Designing, building, and testing production level code that functions at scale.
- An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
- Experience applying AI tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and build testing. Familiar with AI-assisted development workflows.
- A preference for working collaboratively with people, not in a silo. Pairing, thought partnership, and shared investigation feel natural, not like overhead.
- Able to communicate technical complexity clearly to product and design partners, and help the team navigate tradeoffs with full context.
- Strong systems thinking: the ability to build mental models of unfamiliar systems, ask the right questions, and produce clear analysis that others can act on.
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.
