Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the heart of a mature SaaS product surface: customer facing workflows that are both high volume and operationally sensitive. Building in domains like payroll, benefits, and HR tends to demand strong correctness, auditability, and reliability, which makes the work especially relevant to SaaS companies that monetize trust and recurring usage over time.
From a SaaS career perspective, the scope across the full product lifecycle is notable. The role combines frontend experience design with backend API architecture, plus the less visible work that matters in subscription businesses: iteration after launch, performance tuning, and long horizon ownership. Exposure to large Rails and React codebases also translates well across many established SaaS organizations, where scaling feature delivery without degrading quality becomes a core engineering competency.
This position is best suited to senior engineers who prefer broad product accountability over narrow component ownership, and who are comfortable influencing direction as much as shipping code. It will fit someone who enjoys mentoring, navigating complex business rules, and applying pragmatic engineering judgment in systems where small changes can have outsized customer 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
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
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
Do you prefer platform development instead? Check out our Staff Software Engineer, Core Platforms job listing.
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.
